Interesting to hear your experience as a TA validates mine as a student. That's a good example of what I mean by an unnecessary assumption or simplification that was done purely to make the class more manageable for some students.

A not-insignificant portion of engineers don't know much anything about physics or math and want nothing to do with either. This is very scary, because these people tend to blindly follow standard engineering practice (which is not necessarily correct) or worse, make up something that is very wrong. A friend of mine told me they went to a job fair and heard a recruiter for an engineering company brag that you won't have to do any more calculus if you worked for them.