Honestly, this course would have been a game-changer for those of us who went to terrible colleges with minimal opportunities for internships. The disconnect between theoretical classes and practical ones was simply too vast to grasp for the majority.
You sound like one of the top tier of students, being a programmer before entering college (which I assume was a good one). There are colleges out there where the faculty have only a theoretical relation to any actual useful knowledge. E.g. my semester-long networking class actually had less content than just watching a few YouTube videos. My operating systems class had a prof who was so completely clueless about so many things I can't list them. On the first day of class, he said "There are 3 OS (sic) - Windows, Mac and Unix" and refused to believe a student who told him that OSX is a unix. My CS education is entirely self-taught as a result.