I have no issues with the nerfed light farm that exists today for ARR relics. While the book grind is exactly that, it is in line with the reward. Instead of the HW relic where the steps between "clear these dungeons" and "do the light farm" are all things that you can farm beforehand... that just puts the grind on the front-end. Grinding dungeons for poetics. Grinding beast tribes for the unidentifiable whatevers. The book farm is just done in series. You are either grinding content one way or another way.

If anything, it makes the book grind one of the few unique steps across nearly all of the relics in FFXIV. Having the player do leves, hunts, FATEs and dungeons? Honestly, that is ARR in a nutshell and fits very well. Even if it is annoying.