>PhD programs are hard. They’re often lonely. They’re frustrating. They’re tedious. And there’s a tremendous amount of pressure. And it’s academia: highly bureaucratic and political and often unfair.

>Unless you possess a serious passion for the subject, you’re unlikely to survive.

This is mostly a recent phenomenon in engineering. I went to a top school and left almost a decade ago. While advisors like what you described existed, roughly half of them were not like that. It really was fun, and relatively relaxed.