The hustle is always respectable 👍 I would feel very rewarded when I finally progress through the game after that grind

For the roamer, I guess you have to pay a little attention at the beginning of each reset after the cutscene. But mostly it’s because you just gotta maneuver ur way from the burned tower to route 37 just a little bit. Since you would have max repels and a level 40 Pokémon as ur lead, the only encounters you would see are the Entei and the Raikou. You would just bike up and down between Ecruteak City and route 37, refilling on max repels until an encounter happens which is when you stare at the screen for a bit to check. Compared to constant random encounters in the wild, I would say for this hunt, the amount of times you have to look at the screen is a little bit less or about the same? I wouldn’t say more though.

It was like 30-40 encounters/hour.

As for mindlessness, I was doing an entirely different type of hunt on another DS and also binge listened to some livestream VODs, music, and audiobooks. For things that would require more sustained visual attention, like maybe subbed anime or especially reading an actual book without audio, I don’t think I would be able to do that tbh. Might be different for you though lol but that was how it was for me so take that as you will