I've noticed something similar in University that was very frustrating for me.

Freshmen and Sophmore year all math classes had tens or hundreds of problems that get progressively harder and bring out every corner case e.g. take then derivative of x^2 then 2x^2 then x + 2x^2 then sqrt(x) + 2x^2 + 3x^3. Eventually you could derive the most archaic equations

Junior and Senior year Engineering homework is like 2 Epic questions with 10 parts that feed into eachother. I would have learned more and been more confident if they gave like 10-20 starter problems and then one final epic one at the end.

I feel like this is similar to the story of a pottery class having half the class make as many items as possible while the other half had to make just 1 perfect piece. The group that was targeting quantity actually produced better pieces then the group that was targeting 1 perfect piece

edit: typo