Amount (not difficulty) of ground combat

As previously discussed in the Automatic Ground Combat thread, a large number of ground combat missions can become tedious. While I was very happy to see that the position of the development team seems to allow you to select how much ground combat you want to do, I just want to emphasize some additional points.

There won't be any penalty for not attacking a crash site. If you don't want to do a ground combat mission, don't do it.

1. I like ground combat and I like it to be difficult. I just don't like doing very similar missions many times.
   
2. I very much like the geoscape part of the game: progressing through the story and researching new technologies.
   
3. I really appreciate games that are "time efficient", that are packed with interesting and difficult gameplay but do not use repetitive content as "fillers" to increase play time. (Among fans of a 20 year old game, I'm sure I'm not alone in having limited time for gaming ).
   

With these points in mind, and the quote by Chris, I just want to bring up how the amount of ground missions that you chose to do affects the progression of the game. Of course you will "miss out" on the loot and experience from these ground missions. (?) Will the story progress at the same pace anyway? Will this make it unreasonably difficult in the long run?

Maybe some thought could be given to "difficulty" settings specifically addressing this. I.e., not making combat (any single mission) easier but still making the game faster and shorter.

Could someone remove this thread, in favor of http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php?1143-Amount-not-difficulty-of-ground-combat. The parenthesis in the title of this thread seems to mess the forum links up.