> These students are obviously smarter than the average student, and therefore I would expect more of them, like inventing new OS concepts instead of mimicking age-old designs.
You can disagree but here are the facts:
1. The students completed the task.
2. The professor had intentionally built slack into the schedule to let ambitious students take this further to play around with the tools & their knowledge to try doing creative things.
3. The students used this to recruit others students to form a larger team around a more ambitious end goal
4. Self-organized to distribute work & build a schedule that minimized interdependencies
5. Completed their goal.
Aside from the technical stuff, these all sound like valuable soft skills that were learned/applied in addition to the technical achievement. I'd say both the professor & students did a good job here.
What's hard for me to say is what year this is. In my old engineering school there was a final project in years 3 & 4. Your team would pick some kind of vague final project (with consultation from your teacher), you'd get a budget for materials + connections to companies/vendors for sponsorship, & then go about building your concept. That's a bit more complex than this but also lasts 1.5 years and happens largely outside of school. This blog post is about a project done within the context of 1 subject AFAICT. That makes it way more impressive.
Students at this level simply don't yet (at least generally) have the experience nor a good understanding of the space to understand what are more significant problems to go tackle. From what I've seen you usually start that journey as a masters/PhD student.