I would love to have some sort of statistics on what the proportion of this feeling is. My suspicion is that the practical approach is probably about 90% of the population (who is willing to learn math at all). Would be helpful in trying to figure out how to tune learning programs. (I say this as one who is perfectly content to learn the theory directly and with little-to-no practical motivation, but my impression is I'm very much in the minority on that.)

I was going to say that the curriculum is tuned in favor of those who can just learn by theory, but then I realized that's not even true. It's tuned in favor of those who will simply swallow it without any idea what it is for; it is neither contextualized in terms of what it is practically good for, nor is it contextualized in terms of theory. It's just... there.