'Grind' is fairly subjective.
I think most will agree that clicking, that even a monkey could do, just to keep the user active at the keyboard is the sort of grind almost nobody enjoys (and yet an alarming number of devs do anyway).
This is not that.
This is a
game.
Games, by their very nature, require some time investment. Now, if you don't enjoy the sort of game, you'll probably call it 'a grind' that you're going through just to see the pictures.
But some folks, like me,
enjoy the game. It's not a grind at all. It's an interesting challenge to be solved. The 'juicy' stuff is the icing on the cake.