Also don't confuse motivation with laziness, priorities, or time management. To a psych major, calc might seem like one of those bullshit classes you have to take. To an EE Major it might just be more hours of work that could be spent sleeping.
I could certainly see how those motivators wouldn't apply to all students, though. Honestly they applied to me mostly out of personal, side-project-esque interest. In CS I tend to use statistics and discrete math a lot more than calculus, though calculus comes up occasionally.
the second semester of my sophomore year i decided that my interest in computers and desire to have a job lead to me changing my major from psychology to computer science. i signed up for calc II as my first college math class and felt exactly like you did, getting an A+ despite not having taken math for almost 2 years.
i hated high school math because it felt like pointless memorizing of stupid facts. i loved college math because it was about describing and reasoning about these conceptual objects and i didn't have to memorize a thing if i could just remember how to derive it. they explain how to think about these objects, and once i understand the framework behind the subject i enjoyed it much much more.
the fact they were reasoning, explaining/proving why the math worked, and presenting the logic behind their thinking was enough to make me love it. i went dual math/cs and eventually got a MS in pure math.
So they added a calculus requirement to cut the numbers.