Glad you thought it was interesting, that makes me really happy to hear. Re. "not really affirmative action", I'm not like an AA expert, but my university went all the way to the Supreme Court to defend that very admission policy, in a lawsuit that attempted to repeal affirmative action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...

I think in general the population is mostly against affirmative action because it seems racist, and they just substitute their own ideas of how those policies are implemented. It's the same thing where if you asked people if murderers should be let go over some kind of procedural technicality, then they'd probably say no because murder is bad. However, in practice those technicalities are stuff like how evidence is collected, which can lead to potentially innocent people being convicted, etc...