Took me the entire time from the game's release up until a couple of days ago to realize that capturing monsters in moga woods yields MASSIVE reward boosts (never occurred to me that it used the same rules as regular quest captures). Been plugging away with couple of minute royal ludroth captures and rathians in hardly 10 (seems like less).
I only started paying attention to the fishing fleet's area comments recently as well, and it's amazing how much extra stuff you get from that by sending the ships to the areas they suggest.
Finally came back around to using barrel bombs, traps, and flash bombs in ridiculous quantities again, with great results (particularly cause I'm rolling in money from moga woods and can afford to spam out my spending). I managed to happen upon a jewel that gives me instant capture guru, so I've been bringing a full set of gear, books, and mats to make what I need, along with the proper weapon and equipment and I'm tearing through stuff fast enough to make the grinding tolerable again.
I know a lot of this stuff is really basic for monster hunter, but I had gotten so used to taking a grinding brute force approach to everything that it's refreshing to take a step back and start taking the easy (planned, basically) approach to things and mop up.
At one point just a few days ago before making the change, I had fought a lagi in moga woods to red sharpness repeatedly due to using a crap LS that I hadn't upgraded (anata boneblade - I was hoping for the para to kick in but it never seems to hit). Probably took 90 minutes of going back and forth with it healing up after kicking my ass (I had brought maybe a few potions and was having horrible luck with scrounging up herbs, and was getting juggle-killed after bouncing anyways). Just before giving up I decided to unload on it with the stones I had harvested, killing it with just a couple remaining.