Yeah, that was a lot much, not a bit much, a lot much, even in context of the conversation you can overhear on your last day at the hospital.
I don't think the answer to complaints of grinding is necessarily to make everything go by faster.
That risks making the complaints about waking up as a girl and being the world's biggest slut a fortnight later very valid.
I think the problem is that there's nothing happening along the way.
If the only way to get from level 5 to level 50 is to plant, harvest and process a metric shitload of fields and fruit trees and cook ridiculous numbers of meals, that's a grind.
If you can get several levels doing stuff for the Elves, Dwarves and/or stray humans of Ered Luin or for the Hobbits of the Shire or for the Hobbits and humans of Swanfleet then move on when you're ready to Bree-land, the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs or from Swanfleet to Cardolan, then after Bree-land you can go to the North Downs or to Evendim or to the Lone-lands or skip a few levels by doing missions from the mission hubs, then you can go to Forochel or Angmar or the Trollshaws and Misty Mountains or do missions or do skirmishes or redo the Great Barrow and/or Fornost instances or keep farming and cooking or go out and harvest ores and make ingots and make jewellery, swords, axes, plate armour, shields, toolkits, chisels and rifllers or harvest logs and make lutes, theorbos, harps, bows, staves, spears, clubs, bookshelves, beds, breakfast tables and totem poles or mix all those approaches together and go to Eregion at any level from 42 to 52, depending entirely on when you feel ready, and go back to kick the Angmarim around some more when you're level 55 and it's easy, then it's a game and you can happily sink MONTHS into playing it without it feeling like as much of a grind as ONE DAY of doing the same instance twelve times an hour.