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A few thoughts come to mind

>Realistically, do programming courses get better/more interesting?

I think it strongly depends on your personality. For me, no they didn't. What I discovered (far too late) was that I liked tinkering with little things like a web site for fun or an algorithm in computational physics, but I hated software engineering as a field in the real world. I know folks who really get a kick out of refactoring a library and do a great job at it—I'm not that person. I know folks that can have a great time writing super awesome unit tests and messing with makefiles—I get frustrated. Although I like improving legacy code from time to time, I can't do it full-time.

> I took a few classes at my community college and to be honest, they discouraged me.

The people that I knew that took programming courses in community college and then university overwhelmingly thought that university was better. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I feel like I need to mention it as 100% of developers I know who have done both recommend university. (Interestingly, however, this is not true of the mixed folks like graphic designers I know that do a little bit of code and mostly design)

[diericx]

I can't tell to what extent I am like you, but I can relate.

I really like developing complete programs and games from the ground up and tinkering with code, but I'm not sure about the other topics. Once I am done with a project I will often refactor the code just because it's sort of fun/nice to have clean and organized code. I just don't know if I could see myself doing this every day.

What were later courses like for you?