They have not. If you want to tailor the game to fit a different pace you will probably want to look toward mods. It would be possible to lower item weights, drop rates, recipe requirements; all stuff that would cut down the grind without interfering with your save data.

You could also enhance the limits of some saved information like your number of inventory slots, item durability or maximum carry weight, which have a little chance of causing adverse side effects if you choose to remove them (e.g. items in your extra inventory slots will blink out of existence if you uninstall those slots and continue playing).

There is also the tedious and messy approach which is using console commands, which would let you change all sorts of values individually. Probably not practical for the scale of change you want.

So it's a shame that there aren't more settings like these built into the menus, but you do have choices.