One thing I've seen is that people convinced that in-person education is the best will try to focus on making their online classes more like in-person classes, when that might be the wrong direction needed. Particularly since it sounds like you and your colleagues (as well as the students) were thrown into things suddenly with little to no experience. If you were trying to discover success from your own classes, those of your colleagues in a similar situation, or those from your students, I'd imagine it'd be slow going, since it sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind.
On top of this, schools tend to be constrained with trying to fit everything into the particular confines of what's considered a class. I don't know about your particular school, but all of the ones I've seen would never try to educate students with something like The Odin Project, even though many here think it's a great example of online education.
Also, even with a great program and experienced teacher, changes in education styles entail a transition period for the students. We would expect this to be much slower in such a rocky transition with the professors themselves trying to figure out what to do. But even with poor circumstances I'd expect to see at least some amount of progress as students adjusted to things. Did you not see any?
You mention them being exposed to the classes of several hundred professors at your university. Surely there was some variability in the success the professors had. What difference did the school see between the more successful classes and the less successful classes?