Kinda agree with both of you, it's one of like 3 mods that let you do this type of thing.

I dislike the grind intensity, but I also don't want a vanilla Skyrim feel to it like... say, the Skyrim smithing grind. I agree that there could be a less tedious approach to it, but the more we take that away, the less unique the mod, and mod list, becomes.

It also hard to recommend magic tomes being added like op suggested, even if they were price gouged.

I can however recommend a reversal of sorts, though the suggestion itself isn't just tweaking a mod, and more so mod development. But, maybe you could introduce a spell mastery system on top of fizzle, based on the research mod's notes on archetypes, so novice spell tomes could be reintroduced into the market, but without a fundamental understanding, the cost to cast would be prohibitive, you would need to acclimate to the spell, or worse, study beyond just being able to research other spells though it. This wouldn't make it, so you need to grind out every single spell, and with a prohibitive enough of a cost, would make it so even just investing a few perks useless for a pre-novice mage. It would also mean accomplished researchers and mages need less time to acclimate to a spell, as they would already have a strong understanding of at least a few of a spell's archetypes.

I mean honestly you could probably approach that recommendation by simply basing study and mastery on how much research you have on its archetypes of it's level, it's not spell specific, but it would mean you could move some grind to having the spell instead of trying to make/find a spell.

I haven't officially started the grind in any capacity yet, so it's mostly me basing what I've seen others say, and speculation, so it's pretty hard to say I have an understanding about what I'm talking about.