This post needs a comparison with CS229a prior to the online courses. Was the course harder before online classes and then got significantly dumbed down? Or was the course easy enough that it was a good candidate for the project?
Then it seems like there isn't so much a problem and the course is plausibly performing its intended function. Obviously the course was designed by Stanford to fill some role; unless you think that the course had a design flaw only detectable once it got rolling, then the best assumption would be that your expectations were wrong.
Of course, you could certainly have asked, as a Stanford student, what drove the design of the course and how the professor actually felt about the execution. That would have been an interesting follow up.
