[hintymad]

> "And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway?"

For christ's sake, Organic Chemistry has a mechanism that's solidly based on theory of chemical bond and structural chemistry(chirality and what not). And for the empirical part? We've got more than a hundred years of experience. How the fuck hard could it be for an undergrad-level course? What's wrong with the students?

[hilbert42]

That's how it was (and things were) when I was doing organic chemistry.

To answer your last question I could suggest some answers but they'd only be inflammatory. Here, the real problem is that it's not that my answers would be inflammatory but why they'd be considered such (as opposed to being just options or ideas, whether right or wrong, in a much wider rational debate).

The real issue is that illogical, unfounded and ill-informed opinion has stifled rational debate, it having the loudest voice—and that nowadays there's no longer any moderating mechanism that's able to pull it back into line.