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Once you give a grappled opponent the Pinned condition do you need to use the "Pin" option each round to keep them pinned, or can you use other options like "Move" or "Damage" without the opponent losing the Pinned condition so long as you successfully maintain the grapple?
Being able to maintain the pin as part of maintaining the grapple would make a lot of monsters with Grab far more threatening. A Gargantuan flying creature with Grab but without Constrict established a grapple against our Inquisitor last session. Each round it used the Damage option to do around 20 damage to him, but he responded by putting Greater Bane on his armor spikes and beating on it for about 80 damage per round. It might have been nice for the monster to stop that damage with a pin, but it might have been a little pointless if it didn't have an ally to help damage the PC (it did, but for whatever reason the DM didn't seem to think of teaming up for the win)
I'm not sure if grapple really needs to be any stronger, and being able to maintain a pin "for free" would make stuff with Constrict even nastier, but I'm curious about how this is "supposed" to work.
Once you give a grappled opponent the Pinned condition do you need to use the "Pin" option each round to keep them pinned, or can you use other options like "Move" or "Damage" without the opponent losing the Pinned condition so long as you successfully maintain the grapple?
Yes, maintaining the grapple automatically maintains the pin as well (instead), and as part of the "maintain" action you do use the other options like Move or Damage.
However once they are pinned it's quite easy to maintain
It used to sort of bug me back in 3.5 that you needed to be at least 6th level to do some ground and pound. On the other hand, the fact that braking the pin breaks the grapple in Pathfinder seems a little weird.
Reflecting upon what might be "more realistic" is probably less useful than thinking about how the current rules could be used in play though. If our DM had ruled this way the Inquisitor might have been in some serious trouble.