You know, I've seen a lot of talk about how grinding was basically eliminated for both the main story and for competitive building, but that's not even all that true. For the main story you don't typically need to, but if you do feel behind and want to catch up quickly by using the EXP Candies, well... You still technically have to "grind to avoid the grind" since you can only get those in meaningful quantities from doing raid dens (which even with animations turned off can still take forever). And even if you never do that for the story, you most definitely will if you build competitive teams, where you basically have to use the candies to save any amount of time due to Galar not having any useful grinding spots (almost like they killed Chansey specifically for this reason).
The Battle Tower also still locks all the important shit behind those goddamn battle points, and while they are cheaper than ever (Ability Capsules went from 200 BP in gen VI to just 50) GF of course had to add a catch. Once you get to the highest rank, you're perpetually stuck getting 2 points per match (unlike in the past where each rank increased the rewards up till you got 7 points each round), and there's no Super version of the battles either.
On top of this, you know how vitamins can be used to fully EV train a mon instantly? Well, that sounds great on paper until you realize how expensive it is. I did the math, and to fully EV train a team of 6 you need over 3 million Pokedollars. Yes, there's ways to grind money but wait, you're still grinding to avoid the grind. Notice the pattern here? Of course, you can always just use an exploit with the Poke Jobs thing and max out stats of multiple mons at once in 3 minutes flat thanks to the raid den resets. It's amazing how that one single oversight has completely shattered this game's timed events.
LATE EDIT: Also TRs, which are basically rebranded move tutors. This normally wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that they replaced the majority of the infinite TMs with useless garbage like Eerie Impulse, Scary Face and Screech. The only reason TRs aren't as big of a pain as they could be is, once again, thanks to the raid den exploit, since you can spam it to rack up watts and also reset the vendors to get whatever you want very quickly.
