When they introduced CCM, before it was CFM, Josh Looman said they were purposely putting in a kind of grinding element on purpose. The idea was sort of copying other story based games that give tasks to skill up, and to reward those who put the time in.
Then with CFM the next year, they shortned the practices and made fewer task scenarios to make the whole practice experience less burdensome on players who wanted to get the XP.
But really, the whole "grinding" idea was a bad one, as even the story based games are moving away from linearity to open worlds and systems, giving players more choice and ability to create their own experience.
The grinding element was put in on purpose, and hopefully they've discovered that they need to create options for ways to play. Since people seemed to like the training mode this year with the boss levels and such based on E3, maybe using that system will be more fun, and varied enough from regular gameplay to reduce the repetitive, boring part of practice.
The whole progression system needs work of course, because if you did practice every week in CFM last year your players would be pretty nerfed up by year 2 or certainly year 3, kind of messing with game balance. But since the gameplay was so messed up it's hard to know just how much.