Very true, but with the caveat that progress is never immediately visible. There are often long periods when a learner thinks they’re not progressing at all, when in fact all the work is happening in the background.
I will agree with you that grammar and reading are essential. Otherwise, “cheating” or not, words learned in a vacuum will definitely be forgotten sooner or later.
As for all of the “cheating” discussion, whatever. Some people here like to judge how other people choose to learn, apparently.
OP considers it cheating. 
It’s a discussion forum, presumably they expected feedback.
A few concerns with the OP’s approach:
By skipping kanji in favor of vocab, OP will lack a useful tool to reason out the meaning and pronounciation of new words they encounter (both here and in the wild).
People often complain that WK’s vocab choices are rather contrived to support their particular kanji teaching method; there are probably better pure vocab resources out there.
This specific point I kinda disagree on. If you study kanji only in the context of words, my experience is that you will naturally pick up their usual readings and general meanings. And per-kanji readings and meanings are only useful hints rather than 100% reliable ways to avoid word lookups, so there’s not a huge urgency to study them in advance rather than gradually acquiring them as you read more texts. I don’t personally think there’s much benefit to studying kanji individually.
They are learning…
One comment, while you do this I think you should prioritize the meanings for kanji at least. Try to not let those pass because, for me at least, the meaning is harder to guess and more important than the readings. At least the readings you have words to refer to, you know?
OP, just let SRS do its thing. Seriously.
if you start creating rules here and there it will become stale and boring all the studying situation.