^ The problem with that is, fighting games. How many fights have you had as E Honda or whatever your pick is? For most people that is 1000s but it was never called grindy. There are also gaming elephants in the room like Mario, Tetris, Portal, Minecraft, etc... Most of those are 1000x simpler and more repetitive than EQ, but they never got called grindy! So we need a philosopher king cuz 'grind' is too hard to identify. This is worse than what is an rpg!
There's a difference between grind and practice.
If you play the same song on guitar until you're perfect at it, you're practicing.
Same as when you play the same level in Mario until you beat the speedrun world record.
You're trying to improve your own skills as a player, trying to get your keyboard button presses
just right so you get through the level in the most optimal way. Each time you play through the level, you get better as a player. You improve your reaction times and hand-eye coordination.
Grinding in an RPG has nothing to do with improving your personal skills. A game may be set up in a way to require so much XP for the next levelup that you have to go through a random encounter you already perfectly mastered 100 times. You already figured out the perfect approach, use just the right spells to disable your enemies in turn 1, and take zero damage during the encounter. Yet the next boss fight is still too tough for your party, so you need a levelup. And the game is designed in a way that it requires you to fight this one random encounter you've already flawlessly mastered 100 times more before you level up and can finally attempt the boss.
That's what grind is.
Stuff like Minecraft also has grind because you have to collect a huge amount of a specific resource which also involves repetitive gameplay, but it's a different form of grind from the typical XP grinding found in many badly designed RPGs (mostly JRPGs for some reason).
