How could this course improve?

It is a failure of the educational institution when you take a student who is a) excited about a subject and b) competent in a subject, and output a student who has to struggle not to be absolutely apathetic towards said subject. My biggest disappointment with the course was tests and quizzes essentially boiling down to applying by hand what computers are used to do. I think this course has a lot of potential (I find OR to be a very useful and interesting topic), but the efforts of this course were focused in all of the wrong places. The course was not a mathematically rigorous view of convex optimization, nor was it a rigorous from an applied perspective (which I hope to gain in the ESE 404 Applied OR course). Rather, the course straddled an awkward middle ground where we brush over much of the theory and essentially say "ignore this hard stuff so we can apply this algorithm", at which point you memorize a specific instance of a problem for a test or quiz and promptly forget what you learn right afterwards until the next assessment. Which is quite disappointing, because this is essentially what we teach computers to learn, not students. I can't even begin to convey my frustration that, as a junior enrolled in a nationally-ranked university, I am turning in pages and pages worth of assignments that really come down to whether or not you can successfully add rows of a matrix. I understand that Professor Trobaugh is clearly cognizant of the tedious and frustrating nature of this, so my question is...why not fix it? How about putting this class in a more applied setting? How are we getting the parameters that we are using to plug and chug in our various algorithms? When is it okay to assume linearity? How can we linearize this specific instance of a non-linear problem etc. ? These are the kinds of questions that I had hoped to see covered in the class. Im baffled that a course can, year in and year out, receive complaints not too far from the ones I am enumerating here, and yet still go chugging along as though nothing is wrong. It is truly an embarrassment that there exists a course that is so unsure of what it wants to be at a top-tier university, but what is perhaps more embarrassing is the fact that somewhere along a chain of accountability, someone thinks that this course should be REQUIRED. To show that I am not coming from a 100% negative viewpoint, I will mention some of the qualities of OR that I consider to be redeeming. This course really shines in the problem formulation and the presentations. Excel formulations are both interesting and employable, and the group presentations offer a nice change of pace. The variations of simplex method (which is basically the entire course) are disposable and easily forgotten. This was the first time that I have felt it necessary to rant on a course evaluation, and I apologize if I came off as rude. OR needs to decide what it wants to be, and it should NOT, as it is today, be a required course for Systems Engineers. It seems like the applied option is already taken with ESE 404, so I guess that means that this course should steer more towards the theory of simplex etc. But personally, as it can probably be surmised, I am all for nixing the course altogether. There is no value in awkwardly straddling that middle ground, and it is something that should be fixed.

To add one last point, I think it would be easy discount this seemingly unprovoked salvo as an outlier in a myriad of course evaluations that likely didnt round up to 1000 words. But course evaluations like this yield inherently biased samples, as my peers are probably too busy manually iterating until Z 0 to have time to form such a monolithic opinion of an engineering course. I hope that my opinion is heard and not discarded, but what I really hope is that action will be taken. This course is a sunk cost for me, and my only interest in writing something as scathing as this is with the hope that it will benefit a younger generation of my peers. And if you made it here, thank you.