Oh sure you need the Council Researcher's Badge or whatever the SC and BS equivalents are but that's not a faction grind that's just doing some quests.
So we're not actually talking about grinding faction at all here we're talking about completing a quest chain that a dev allowed people to do in any order they want which is pretty nice.
If you think doing Council quests is bad what's the rush to get into Refuge? Because those quests are far worse believe me.
If you don't like long, multi-part quests I don't have an answer for you especially since the question in the OP, now, is 'how can I more quickly get access to do another, more different, long, multi-part quest?'