They are studying to become professional programmers. I think the enterprise perspective is correct, you don't want grad students with a hobbyist mindset.
I doubt you find many grad students who spends their free time writing enterprise projects. If this was a class project, sure, but this was for something they would do on their free time for fun.
Everytime a professor has said "do this in your free time", they've really meant that it's an ungraded class project that you need to do to the same high standards. Unfortunately, you get less guidance and zero feedback, but if you don't push yourself to do well on your own you're going to fail the up coming projects that implicitly depended on your "free time" project.
In some ways, school can be more insidious in its demands than enterprise.
At that time, I enjoyed writing software only I would ever use. I can set up auto start myself ; I can log with CSV format and write a tool later to process it ; I can hardcode my exclusion list. I would still get enjoyment from the project doing all of those things. And using the clipboard API could open up my next project idea.
Implementing every feature the Prof listed sounds like something I would only do for money.
Even professionally, there is still use for code that only ever gets run by its original author.
