I'm pretty sure part of it is like this- yes, you can treat the game as 'get everything as fast as you can' which is annoying grinding, or you can shift into sandbox mode quicker. Run into a cool car used, blow your money on that, play with it on Nordschliefe for a while... open up a new race, look up what it's like for grinding, pick a decent car and then start working on it so you can do better.
Last time I sat down with GT5, I was clearing the advanced rally events (didn't get to the tarmac ones but I prefer dirt and snow). I was running the Citroen rally car, and started out with a lot of aids on. Then I worked out that I could go a lot faster the more aids I turned off, but it was counterbalanced by spinning out or penalties... started regularly passing the car immediately in front. I was way overkilling the other cars with the rally car, but it opened up the possibility of making the game be about passing ALL of them by the finish, and that turned out to be stupidly fun, because I got that sense of 'killer car destroys the competition' but it was still a challenge to get past everybody. Once I did it, and then spun and got passed by all the AI- maddening! Still 'won' by the rules of the special event, but not by my 'let's pass everybody' rule
None of that time was spent going in an oval for money, but when I do that it's usually with a new fast car, and tuning it to get it to go faster or smoother or better. I was doing that with the rally car- maxed out turbo, and it was all about fiddling with the diffs and gears. On an oval it's more about fiddling with the suspension.
Switching over to that mode means you basically ignore all the really killer expensive cars, and then if you randomly win one, or find it used and have the money, it's actually exciting. It's not part of a laborious plan, it's a surprise. Just saying... eventually you'll be level 40 with lots of money and will have to just start fooling around anyhow. If you start fooling around early, the advanced rewards of the game might be more of a surprise, and since they're so unattainable it'll be like hitting the lottery
you don't get a feeling like that from grind or birthday exploits.
That's what I'm doing. I'm setting myself up for occasional glee. Probably mostly through the used car lot. I've already done some of that, and there will certainly be other 'finds' done this way
that said, I will look up particularly nice prize cars like the Furai and go through the process to get them. Part of the game is figuring out smart paths to winning particular races without throwing a lot of money away...
