Perks up at the mention of IKEA. 
Agree, and it seems true generally for interactive fiction and maybe all video games? The word grind has a negative connotation, but you can see it as a pretty raw form of putting in effort to make the payoff feel more earned. In Assembly a couple early testers suggested automating away the actual putting-together of things, but I felt that having some friction there was thematically important but also helped the pacing – the last scene or two in particular wouldn’t work at all without the player’s direct engagement with the nuts and bolts of the thing. (Which in retrospect still feels right, though I’m never sure about the details.)
As for the other thread of the conversation: I’ll note that both Spring Thing best-in-show winners this year are choice-based: one with a parser-like world model, the other with a deeply implemented political simulation, both from respected authors with a large back catalogue of similarly varied work. It’s hard to cook up a definition of mainstream choice IF that doesn’t fit this sort of thing in it…