I dunno why you were grinding with random monster in FF7 for materia point, the only time I'd grind was at the end of the game with mover and elixir pot, who would give hundreds of point per battles.You mean spending 5 minutes drawing up to 100 for each new enemy, then never having to ever stop to fight that type of enemy again... thus neatly eliminating the hours and hours of grind for the thousands of random encounters you have to do leveling up materia in 7. Then yes. Kidding of course, we've had that argument before and just disagree. I prefer not having to roam around the overworld praying for another random encounter because each one gives you 1 point for materia used, and typically you need 100 or more encounters to level it up. Yeah, drawing up to 100 for new spells is tedious. But it can be done in 1 random encounter... then you never have to fight that particular enemy ever again. To me it was an elimination of the ridiculous grind for random encounters 7 had. You can play through 8 and never once have to run around in a circle in the overworld trying to trigger the next random encounter just because I desire to cast fira instead of fire.
I won't defend the story, visuals, or just overall experience; 7 was superior. But I'll always defend grind, 8 just had way less.
And drawing took way more than 5 minutes, it was closer to 10 mins per characters (more on higher level monster who would give less per draw), so about 30 min per new ennemy, time around 50 magics or so.