As another MIT alum I'd heartily second your statement "Most MIT students interact with one another in class as fellow masochists struggling together against a common foe". IHTFP anyone? One difference I have with you is in identifying the foe. I'd say it was the faculty, not the material. A second difference would be in assessing it as an advantage. I've encountered people who went to other schools that are, IMHO, at least as good as MIT (U. Chicago, Caltech). The experience they describe was less focussed on inflicting pain on the students and more on the cool stuff to be learned.
The first lesson from Prof. Rota is about making the painful and unhealthy practice of spending seven hours at a desk a routine thing. The course he cites is 18.03. Its subject, ordinary differential equations, is about as well understood as anything in mathematics. The ODEs that are solvable have generally been solved. I'd question the value of putting students through a meat grinder of lectures and problem sets to drill them in the mechanics of solving those problems. AFAIK computers can do the job now for both those with closed-form solutions, which students can be made to solve, and for those that require numerical methods. Would the students not be better served by a course that focussed more on understanding the nature of the equations and their relationship to physical phenomena than on how to grind through solving them using specific known methods?
The most significant thing that came out of MIT anywhere near my time there was the RSA cryptosystem on which most network security still relies. The most significant aspect of RSA is not the math of the factoring problem that it's based on, but the clever application of that math to create an asymetric cryptosystem. Grinding ODEs does not teach that kind of creativity. I'd argue that making learning into a painful grind actually hinders it.