Mostly, yeah. The core gameplay loop is: discover monster, hunt monster, make gear out of monster. In between that, you'll be gathering resources from the monsters' homes. There's really not much here for someone who doesn't like the idea of fighting large bosses for 8-20 minutes at a time (depends on your skill).
You don't need to build every armor set, so you don't have to grind every boss, but expect to kill the monster with the set you want somewhere between 4-15 times (15 if you're really unlucky and don't get a gem, which is something like a 8-15% drop rate per hunt if you're doing it right). A skilled player can make it through the entire game on 2 or 3 sets, less skilled players might need 5 or 6 (the ability to upgrade armor without needing to build a new set helps and must reduce that number a bit).
There are occasional quests to deliver resources and investigations where you can explore the biomes without a goal to hunt something, allowing you to learn the maps, where the bosses live in those maps, and where the rare resources/cat allies live in the maps.
TLDR: if you don't want to hunt big bosses over and over, this really isn't for you.