I'm with you on the grind for sake of grind. I'm not fan of unlocking item x because it lets you unlock item y which in turn lets you get z and that's it's only purpose. That's coming from a guy who has 1000's of hours in factory building games.

I'm choping it up to early access and how they want to cater the player base by adding content that they will experience rather than them going back to the begining of the game and re polishing how it feels.

Grind for the sake of grinding versus a nice difficulty and progression system is a very fine balance to hit. Especially since everyone is different and sensititive to these issues in different ways. Some people can just grind for the sake up making a number go up and that's the reward, others needs those numbers to translate into some new action, number goes up is just the path to cool thing x.

But these type of things don't really get addressed until the final sweap of the game once all the features are in.