I had the same experience in 1999. I never understood how that software could be so bad. A student using something in a student manner shouldn't be able to crash the thing in multiple different ways. It would be like if I opened Blender as a newbie, hit a button somewhere, and clicked in the viewport and it hard-crashed. I'm sure it's possible to crash Blender, but for a newbie it ought to be harder than that!

And then for this to be held up as the example of how software engineering was going to be in the future is just icing on the cake.

I have many and sundry quibbles with various things I was taught in university ~20 years ago, but most of them I at least understand where they were coming from and some of them have simply been superceded, of course. But that software engineering course with Rational Rose has the distinction that, in hindsight, I don't think I agree with a single thing they taught.