Yeah, grinding - in the form of waiting for RNG to grace you with some good luck - is one of the worst parts of MMO game design. I'd even go so far as to say it borders on psychological abuse of players, because the Skinner Box system exploits a psychological weakness in order to encourage players to keep doing it.
And then you have people with psychological differences, like OCD and AD(H)D, for whom the system is even worse. In the first case, because they have much more difficulty not getting sucked into doing a repetitive action, and in the second because their brains have abnormal reward systems, that encourage impulsiveness and short term gratification, rather than long term planning for delayed gratification.
What you need to realise is that in any game, you are performing an activity, for a reason, or in other words, your actions are going to be rewarded, otherwise you wouldn't be doing them.
Skinner Boxes just make you perform for much less of a reason (the chance of getting lucky, and the brief dopamine rush you get from finally getting what you wanted).
I've complained numerous times about games using pure RNG when giving rewards, precisely because of the above problems, and because of how they are essentially exploiting players for the sake of monetisation.
There are ways to seriously mitigate the streaks of bad luck that regularly happen to a good proportion of players, like unlucky streak prevention, which increases drop chances every time you fail to get lucky, so that after a few fails you are guaranteed. And then there's token rewards, that you collect in direct proportion to the amount of work you do, to buy what you want.
Really though, I think there will always need to be some kind of RNG present, because humans are so hard-wired towards taking risks for the chances of rewards, that without that games would be boring.
You can even look at from a cultural perspective, we are a race of wage slaves, so have been conditioned to accept working for so many hours for such-and-such a reward, as a fact of life. And then if you compare the cultural differences of work between the east and the west, then you have the reasons why Asian-grinders are accepted over there, and hated over here.
The game, and the amount of work that has to be done to get a reward, has to be tuned to its audience.
R: You are absolutely correct, and to get away from this we need to get away from a player-centric MMO mindset and focus on making player activities fit into a much larger picture.
