Man, I hate these arguments: "Most mmo have grind so every mmo has to have grind". That's not only untrue as it's dishonest arguing. Just say "I like it the way it is, don't change it or I'll be mad" if that's your opinion after all.
That being said, you (OP) have to understand that a huge chunk of the playerbase here is composed of asian people, which have a big cultural b*ner for time-sinks when it comes to MMOs. They just really dig it, for reasons I won't go in detail. Changing that aspect of this game might make those people simply leave, which would impact pokemmo's revenue.
Another point is that by removing the time-sinks the devs would have to fill that gap with something - content - , which sounds easy and logical in theory (because it is) but requires paid creative thinking, paid manpower to implement, paid manpower to maintain, a paid server that can hold the load of thousands of players accessing that new content simultaneously, so on and so forth.
Adding content also bloats the gamefiles and increases the number of sh*t the devs need to keep track of. Not to mention that whatever they implement has also to work with parts of the different codes from the base ROMs, the code from the database and servers, while still working on windows, linux, (mac?) and android devices.
So it's not as simple as "remove this thing cuz I don't like it". It's more like "remove this thing that's been around forever and has possibly been added by someone that isn't even in the team anymore and was the only one who knew how to mess with it without breaking everything else that depends on it, cuz I don't like it".