[vertex-four]

> People complaining about having to implement backprop in a ML class?

Wouldn't that suggest that other classes the students take have not been academic enough - i.e. that they focus too much on "things you might use day-to-day" vs "this is how/why things work"?

[tnecniv]

This attitude is not uncommon in programming / CS. It's similar to those who pine about learning a half dozen search algorithms when they rarely need to implement them in practice.