You totally miss that Redis is more like a remote interpreter with a DSL that manipulates data structures stored at global variables (keys): you (hopefully) would never complain about languages having this semantics.
I don't think you understood how Redis collections work. The items are just strings, they can't be mixed like integers or strings together or whatever, nor collections can be nested.
The Redis commands do type checking to ensure the application is performing the right operation.
In your example, GET against a list, does not make sense because:
1. GET is the retrieve-the-key-of-string-type operation.
2. Having GET doing something like LRANGE 0 -1 would have many side effects. Getting for error a huge list and returning a huge data set without any reason, creating latency issues. Also having options for GET to provide ranges (SQL alike query languages horror story). And so forth.
So each "verb" should do a specific action in a given data type. Are you absolutely sure you were exposed enough to the Redis API, how it works, and so forth?
About MULTI/EXEC, when AOF with fsync configured correctly is used, MULTI/EXEC provide some of the transactional guarantees you think when you hear "transaction", but in general the concept refers to the fact that commands inside MULTI/EXEC have an atomic effect from the point of view of an external observer AND point-in-time RDB files (and AOF as well). MULTI / INCR a / INCR a / EXEC will always result in the observer to see either 2, 4, 6, 8, and so forth, and never 3 or 5.
Anyway, I believe you didn't put enough efforts in understanding how really Redis works. Yet you criticized it with weak arguments in front of the most precious good we have: students. This is the sole reason why I wrote my first comment, I believe this to be a wrong teaching approach.