I know it was in place, but my ass was in his orgo classes at the time and as a newbie my perspective was limited. Perhaps the goal was to push harder on weed

I know it was in place, but my ass was in his orgo classes at the time and as a newbie my perspective was limited. Perhaps the goal was to push harder on weed out, perhaps he was just determinedly old fashioned. Perhaps he hated teaching second year uni classes. As it was a research heavy uni, I can’t rule out the latter as I reused my qm notes from first year in my p-chem courses verbatim. And there is no inherent obviousness for iupac. Merely that it’s pile-o-memorization was more systematic. It’s just the nature of the subject as compared to other areas of chemistry and physics. Probably better than botany I guess, but I disliked biology.