I don't care if people think I'm sick, stupid, or have poor taste

[Khuutra]

Wait, wait, wait.

My first problem here is that you have taken "grinding" as a negative concept and then turned it into something that should have worked better than it did. The flow of the game was set up to make it so that you would not grind: you would run through, you would get gil, you would get AP
Secondly, grinding is not "logical", it is a result of habit based on the worst trope to survive the Dragon Quest days (and I love Dragon Quest, but grinding does not have a proper place in gaming anymore). There is nothing "mainstream" about grinding any more than there is something "logical" about it. The narrative indicates that you are given a sense of urgency in everything you do, so someone going just by what the game tells them will run through and play the game as I have previously described. More, the game plainly explains to you, in a tutorial that you can rewatch as many times as you want, how to maximize your time spent and how to use enemy types to chain them together to get better loot and better armor faster.

Further, using "mainstream" to describe the logic of grinding is a misnomer. Even in Pokemon, grinding is never really necessary if you know what you're doing, and the idea that the "mainstream" gamer would somehow be indoctrinated into the grinding mindset is simultaneously naive and perhaps a little willingly obtuse.

The game was not counter-intuitive, it only felt that way because it played against your expectations of how becoming more powerful in RPGs is supposed to be done, and that is part of what made it so fantastic: it kept the power creep of more traditional RPG grindfests while streamlining the process that made you more powerful. That's just wonderful.