Smoking is a huge turn off for me as well, but at least it's not shown in this game. As far as the grind, it's middle of the road. At first it wasn't too bad because, for example, at the dinner table you could play with the mother under the table. There was flirting with her and baths with the daughter. But for whatever reason, those things came to screeching halt. And now it's just weeks of nothing.
Which leads me to ask this: why do so many of these games behave similarly? I'm not a RenPy or Python programmer, but I know my way around CSS and a couple of others. In these games I see very little use of random number generators. Often, we work toward a conclusion to a threshold then the entire activity/thread gets shut down. It would not be difficult to employ a randint function wherein an event occurred occasionally. So maybe we sit down at the table and the flirting happens at various times or we can actually go into the mom's bedroom again. The story builds to the point the mom and the MC are starting a real relationship, then drops off a cliff. The grind wouldn't seem so monotonous if devs stayed away from an 'all or nothing' approach. But in almost all these games (VNs) I play that is rarely, if ever, done and the grind becomes a big problem.