I go to a small liberal arts college, so our CS department is rather lacking in course breadth (although that is made up in 1-1 interaction), and so I haven't been privileged with being able to take classes on web technologies. Are you saying that all courses on things that aren't web-based are bogged down with useless crap?

He is actually saying the opposite. He is saying that your CS department is doing you a disservice if it hasn't covered the basics listed by the original poster (OS hacking, theory, making a toy language, etc.). My schooling covered all of that, and they even had a web development elective (separate from low level networking and database classes). I was also told by my professors that when the CS college first started, OS, compiler, networking and database classes were mandatory (now they are just part of a large pool of electives), so this is pretty standard stuff.