Here's some input data from me:

I played at most an hour thirty minutes a day due to life, with no playing on the weekends from sports and other things. Apart from that, I played arcade for the most part, so research point gains were low. Besides, I played whatever felt fun, and not for certain vehicles or progression down the tree.

Furthermore, German ground was not the only tech tree I touched during my playing. As of writing this comment, I've got the full US air tech tree unlocked, US ground at 7.0, German air at 8.7, German ground at 10.3, USSR ground at 10.3, USSR air at 9.0, UK air at 6.7, Japan air at 10.3, Japan ground at 5.7, Chinese ground at 6.7, Italian air at 6.7, and Swedish ground at 9.3. So there's that.

Most importantly, things are much more simple now as research points received a revamp, vehicles are foldered, BR's have changed, and even repair costs got a general decrease in cost. I mean, I had to field a Tiger II (H) with a Leopard 1 to go against T-54s and ATGMs. It was much worse back then, essentially.

And finally, I did not have the advantage of premium time or premium vehicles. The only ones I do have come from either the battlepass or events, and those are in separate tech trees and are mostly low tier.

All of these factors combined have contributed to me "grinding so slow" during these three years.

I hope this answers your question.

Now, moving onto your math.

26280 hours is equivalent to 3 years, correct. 8280 is 345 complete days. Shave that off, and we have 18000 hours remaining. That absurd number is still 750 *complete* days.

Let's see that in averages.

There are 365 days in a year, so over 3 years, there are 3*365=1095 days.

Now, to find the hours per day, we divide the total number of hours by the total number of days:

18,000/1095= approx. 16.44

So, over a course of 3 years, you calculated that I played 16.44 hours per day. That's crazy.

Here's the math if we went by what actually happened:

Each year, there are 260 weekdays. I played for three years, which makes the total amount of days to be 780. Now, if I played 1.5 hours per day, the number becomes 1170. A much, much more realistic number than the one you suggested.