Stop giving us assignments that are meant to remake old stuff (like "construct a Turing Machine Simulator" or "Make a compiler").

No those should be kept.

I think we should leave out the task to create a cookbook application which takes all the input via console (during my class not even that. We had to interact with the objects directly through Bluej). There are way better options to teach data management...

What annoys me is how I've been forced to basically to not use the technology we have today, like, in formal automata class we can't use any visualization library, already implemented library for data structures, etc. That is, IMO , plain annoyance and a bit pointless. I understand we should be able to understand those concepts, but why do we have to remake the wheel?