I agree with you about forcing it.
Grinding for the sake of grinding should be discouraged, since it's unrealistic and game-breaky, but I don't think the solution is to remove it, or even to keep it in it's current state.
If you make it so that pure grinding is such an ordeal that only the obsessive-compulsives will bother with it beyond a certain point, and also add other, more interesting, methods of increasing experience in various skills, then it would not only make the game feel more real, but also make it a whole lot more fun.
There might be actual choices involved, and maybe even a little bit of role-playing.
For instance, we might be able to loan our dwarfs out to the Mountainhome (to whatever backwoods podunk "Fortress" they send our dwarf to, that is). Mountainhome "grinds" for us, and returns our dwarf to us (hopefully--as accidents do happen), with increased experience, and a slightly better political relationship.
On the other hand, we could hire them out to the humans, in which case they'd get paid, but the items they make could end up in the hands of the goblins, and they'd *certainly* end up in the hands of the humans.
As it is, the "grinding" we have in the game is just too short a process to even matter. It's just a distraction in the early part of the game. If it were made a lot longer in it's pure form, but also made more optional, rather than a requirement, I think a lot of people would be happier.