You're assuming that a particular grade is a good result. It's an issue I think a lot of students have -- I certainly did. And it's not exactly the fault of students... The whole system seems geared towards the "good grade = success" metric. It's a weird kind of institutional laziness.
I don't know your specific situation, and I also don't really care if you cheated in your class and still got an A. And I'm happy that you got some programming skills out of it! But -- as someone who now teaches at a couple of universities -- I want students to be engaged, to not treat the work cynically, and to actually do the work I assign. As a professor, I am not only more experienced than you, but I know a lot you don't know. Trust me. That's why they hired me. If you consider the class nothing but useless busy-work, get out of the class. An engaged student who tries hard and gets a C is preferable to a student who does show up, cheats, and gets a A. That C is way more respectable than the A and the C student should take more pride in it than the A student. (And it's sad that our system doesn't really allow that.)
Don't get confused about what the actual goal of education is.