Shark Cards only stop you from the initial busywork before you are forced into more busywork again.
It's not even necessary there. When I started, I just did the double money adversary modes for fun and earned enough to buy some cars and a couple of businesses. It was just playing the game for fun. I probably made like 20 million from that alone. That's 150$ worth of sharkcards. Why would I want to pay that, when I can just play the game and have fun? The "pay to skip it" crowd are the first ones to quit, because they don't actually like playing the game. So they just get what they want immediately and then don't have any fun with the game anyway and leave. And some of them will even justify it and say, well I got like 10 hours out of the game, that's enough for me.
If you need to spend money to skip some "initial setup" so you can finally get into the "good part of the game", you probably don't really like the game to begin with. I continue playing fun game modes just for the fun of it, even though I don't need the money anymore. If matchmaking wasn't so bad and people weren't so unreliable, I'd still do heists, even though I don't need the money. I just love the process. The Casino Heist has a lot of options and different approaches. I love everything about it. The setup, the execution, looting the vault, the escape. I just can't handle people staying in the vault and triggering the alarm, or leaving after one failed try.
It is. Most of the online revolves around doing mundane missions for people or running errands or whatever. Online GTA is the definition of busywork.
Even the heists are busywork.
You even described some of the busywork. You have to occasionally throw out guests at your nightclub. How is that engaging on any level?
It takes like 10 seconds, you baby. You push one button.
What does mundane missions even mean? The game is about killing, stealing cars and dealing drugs.
Even if all that is mundane to you, there's tons of minigames that are really fun. You have PvP like Kill Quota or Over the Line, games like Sumo, Sniper vs. Panto, Insurgents vs. RPG. If you don't like any of that shit, I wonder what you could ever possibly like about GTA at all. What has GTA ever been other than stealing cars and delivering them, or killing enemies?
Isn't everything in every game just "busywork"? The game tells you what to do and you do it, so you can get to the next part of the game. Maybe you don't like games.
You like to "fuck around" in freeroam, but you don't like getting 300k for doing some kind of PvP battleground for 30 minutes?
It sounds to me like you don't even really know the game.