Anything requiring persistence is work and you even call it work later on, so you contradict yourself.
3-5 loops is 15-20 minutes a loop, is roughly 1.5 hours of gametime. That is a lot of time to complete a single task.
Anything requiring more than 30 minutes of gametime isn't fun, its work. And I'm not being paid to play this game, so that is time I could be doing something else.