So: you went to college determined to find a path through it that would let you "get straight A's" and "graduate as quickly as possible", and then treated each course as a list of stuff to "check off"... and you're upset that you didn't get very much out of college?
Well, duh.
Every year I get a number of students whose entire motivation to be in my class is that they want to get the piece of paper. This sort of purely extrinsic motivation does not tend to make them very good students (although occasionally I have one that does well and gets an A, good for them). I'm always a little disappointed in them, because the class is more fun for both of us if they're more internally motivated; sometimes I can manage to get them actually interested, and then they perk up and are happier (and often do better), but sometimes they've just decided that they're not going to like college, and you know what? I can't force them to.
So, I guess they "win" that argument. But, it's an expensive argument to win; and it's kind of a shame, really.
As an aside, I also wanted to respond to this line:
> Getting an A is as easy as doing everything
Yes and no. In my class, and in those of my colleagues who have not overinflated their grades, As are gotten by the students who impress us with their outstanding work. Part of that is, of course, making sure they do all the pieces (don't skip anything, make sure it all works, check your work, etc), and the smart-but-sloppy students who skip things tend to be my A- and B+ students rather than my A students. But the students whose primary priority is checking everything off on a checklist, just "doing everything", rather than "getting it" or "making a cool thing" or whatever, almost invariably don't succeed in getting the A. It sounds like your background meant that you'd already learned a lot of the material independently, so your situation is different, but I think comments like the above are rather misleading for the bulk of students, who are learning this material on their first time around.