I started a course in philosophy during my first year of university. I studied CS (in the UK, where you don't typically go far outside your major) but I'd always been curious about the humanities and thought it worthwhile to learn about all fields of knowledge. I'd also read about philosophy for laymen books as a teenager.
In the first lecture, I remember being surprised at how rational and logical the lecturer was. However, in the second lecture, we started getting into the details of different theories of meta-ethics. I was interested in the topic, but the presentation was exactly as you describe, focused on hairsplitting the viewpoints of everyone who'd debated the question previously.
In the last few years I was inspired to start analysing my own ideas and began studying philosophy in my own time. I now know my undergraduate experience was typical of analytical philosophy, which dominates the English-speaking academic world. Unlike continental philosophers, they believe that there's an objective reality and that our thoughts should be logically consistent. However, they also have accumulated a pile of logical puzzles (Frege cases, Gettier problems, the Raven paradox, etc) which imply that language does not straightforwardly refer to reality, that certain knowledge is impossible, and so on. This skepticism is (imo) at the root of the "debaters paradise" you observed.
Anyone looking for an alternative should give Objectivism a serious study. It has such a bad reputation in academic circles that I dismissed it for a long time, but when I finally got around to reading serious Objectivist non-fiction, I found it held together much better with my view of reality. It's basically a version of Aristotelianism, with some of the mystical implications removed. (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the book to read if you want to dive in at the deep end).