I really don't think you even tried the game.
1. Most things in the game are buyable. I've posted you how to make billions. It takes you just once per ingame week to gather 100 fruit, put them into kegs and 100 wine from kegs sell. Eventually you'll have so much cash to buy out everything you'll stop bothering with doing this completely.
BEFORE MAXING as everything to buy is less than $ cap.
2. The work load is capped not with hours but with your energy and speed. Certain item boosts your energy permanently, items boost your speed, upgrading tools lower your energy consumption. Eventually you won't even care because with so much $ to spend you'll buy thousands of "cheap" salad from the saloon.
3. Low on minerals and gems? Luckily you have so much cash you'll never spend it all. So you'll drive to desert every wednesday, buy hundreds of omnigeodes that can drop any mineral or ore including rare iridium. Sure, you can go grind for all of it in mines, but that's just you. Not me.
4. In second and next years clearing all the farm land happens the first day of the year when rocks and branches spawn. Once you do that in a matter of minutes basically, it's all gone for the whole year and doesn't respawn. You're not doing that because rocks/wood which you're buying. You're doing that because you want grass which grows by itself. After 2-3 years of doing this, you'll sell all animals and barns and stop caring. Because…
5. You'll get two items. Statue of perfection which is a reward for certain actions and statue of endless fortune which you buy for a pocketchange: a million only. Each gives items automatically. Daily.
http://stardewvalleywiki.com/Statue_of_Endless_Fortune
There is only one thing in this game that needs constant grind. Didn't know it before a few days ago when I noticed hearts drop - it's relationship with NPCs. It decays over time and as such is incompatible with the rest of the game where eventually there is no point to do farming, mining, fishing, foraging nor minecrawling any more unless you find that fun to do.
But let's leave that aside, developer talks with the community so I'll write him about this and why it sucks.
The product is not about managing a farm. You're not forced to do any farm at any point at all. If you hate farm you can get everything only by fishing. If you hate that too, you can go dungeons. If you hate everything, well, I don't see why you bought the game in the first place.
It's not about grind more either, it's grind less (except relationships). It's not my nor anyone else's problem you can't devise a strategy on how to eventually stop with grinding.
This is Sims where you do what you want when you want and if you want. It's not facebook cowclicker where you just must.
