From my little experience with the AI community, I think people in it love to obfuscate things. Any attempt to make a topic approachable, even if some of the details are lost, get smacked around. I face this every day in my Masters. If you don't already come with a knowledge of AI + Stats, you're on your own. The community, including the teachers, don't want to teach the mundane.
Techy people, by and large, don't understand marketing. We think that technology should sell itself, and anyone who needs convincing of the superiority of some solution is just dumber than they are. Combined with the elitism complex we see all over academia and the genuine complexity of AI research as it stands today... recipe for sociopathic disaster.
I'm in the GA Tech program. Chose AI since I've never touched it. Every course has been terrible in this track. The lectures are awful. The readings take hours upon hours. The TAs pathologically refuse to answer guestions without channeling Confucius. Then I found old GA Tech videos and MIT open courseware. It's starting to make sense. I say all of this because intro to ai is highly rated. It can only get such a rating if it's coming from people that already know the material.
Are you in the OMSCS or on-campus program? I'm currently enrolled in CS 6601 (Artificial Intelligence) via OMSCS, and while it's extremely difficult material that requires a lot of personal investment to master, I've found both TAs and other students to be as helpful as one could reasonably expect.
OMSCS. The TAs refuse to answer questions because it could help cheating. They won't review homework because it could help cheating. They've created an environment so full of fear that it's impossible to learn from mistakes. I'm surprised the slack channel is allowed.
I've never had a direct question to a TA go unanswered (and I've asked my fair share of questions). They're not going to just give you the solution to the homework, though. I guess it depends on what kind of questions you're asking?
