I managed to get into Stardew after some insistence, but I also struggled with this for a long time and I know exactly why in my case after coming back to harvest moon for a bit: the player character is too slow. You spend soooo much time walking and unlike HM/RF you don’t have a sprint button, so everything becomes more stressful to do.
Sorry to say but “BRICS” is far from “made up nonsense” here in Brazil. There’s plenty of export and some industries that got a boost thanks to it, it’s a very real economic block. I don’t know why you would think that it is not real, especially now that we are setting up a payment system to avoid the dollar usage.