I'm not saying I want to cheat. I'm saying that I want for there to be a viable way in-game to set up for that sort of project without necessitating hours of grind before you ever get a crack at the good stuff (and that when you've already ridden the grind up to the endgame, to boot). Maybe you can derive pleasure from spending all of your time doing that and then saying "I built that!". Me? I derive my pleasure from the creative process, at least as far as building goes. I don't want to spend hours gathering rocks, I want to spend them figuring out interesting forms I can build, drawing up building plans, arranging props, and so forth.
I've played a lot of games that encourage grind. I've enjoyed playing grindy games; to a certain extent it can be fun, when there's a real feeling of progress. But when the grind itself isn't fun (and repeatedly killing monsters/mining out planets for pixels isn't fun for me), but rather a gateway that you have to force your way through to get to the fun stuff, I don't have any interest in it. In fact, I think I can pinpoint the moment where this hatred of unnecessary grind came from (two days of near-continual flax farming and bowstring making back in my Runescape days so I could afford an abyssal whip, but that's tangental).
That aside, there is literally nothing stopping you from grinding out everything you need to build things even if the game is set up to make it relatively simple to get materials. When the options are between "People who want to build can get materials easily; people who want to gather materials can do so at their leisure." versus "People who want to gather materials can do so at their leisure, people who want to build can get fucked." I honestly don't see why you would chose the second. Why does it hurt you for other people to be able to enjoy the game in their way? A direct route does not preclude the possibility of an indirect route.
No, seriously though. Either I'm working, or I'm in classes and working, or I'm enjoying a few days of holiday. In none of those cases do I want to spend my free time "playing" a game by mindlessly repeating self-imposed fetch quests and give myself CTS so that I can spend a few hours doing something I enjoy.