I find this justification downright weird. Yes, a class like 6.001 is an extremely purified and unrealistic view of modern software engineering. But the same could be said of any theoretical subject. The people at the Large Hadron Collider are probably spending a lot more time reading 300-page technical manuals than they are reading Feynman.

A lot of the charm of academia, to me, is that it gives you some breathing room to step back from the mess, and look for unifying principles. There might be a bit of a shock when the student first graduates, but in the long term they're often better off with the kind of knowledge that they couldn't easily pick up through osmosis.