You're absolutely right. It's a test of endurance really, because the elevator (and other elements, such as Meno's choice to climb back up and down the tower to defeat 10 machines instead of just taking her option to have sex) are basically ways to extend the game via repetition rather than adding anything new or challenging.
Then again, IMHO, it's a damn RPG; if you're having trouble beating an RPG of any kind, it'd better be because you're lost or confused on a section of it, rather than stuck on a boss, because you can just level/gold-grind yourself out of anything. Hell, your instructions for this game were: Get gold, get best armor/weapons, get lots of items + item storage, win. That's literally the formula for beating most RPGs other there. When there's a purchasable/affordable item that insta-restores HP/MP (Emergency Rest Kit), you shouldn't be struggling on difficulty alone ... Not to mention you have a 100% escape rate from any enemy, most of which you can simply avoid anyway.
I think the one thing the game does well is that there's quite a few sex scenes (not even including the ones I added), and every level of the tower adds some new feature or "challenge", unlike some of the other JRPG "tower climb" clones. I just translated one of those after translating this one, and the former was so obviously boring that the devs basically coded in Easy Mode and Gallery Unlock options just to avoid the gameplay. And the v1.2 version of this game, which I'm translating now, adds new scenes for every boss, which is a nice touch.
So anyway, my point is that these kinds of games aren't meant to be difficult or even necessarily "fun" in terms of their combat/gameplay; it's the little things like finding sex scenes within the rather monotonous gameplay that attempt to keep your interest.
