Ya know, I get what you're saying and I am somewhat sympathetic to this position. But I think you're being a bit harsh. It's easy to talk about "understand(ing) that this is an extremely important topic" when you already know. But how many high-school kids really know anything about Linear Algebra or understand much at all about how/where it's used? Heck, rewind time a bit and ask if you really understood that when you were first starting college. And if you did, realize that you are probably the exception.

From a university lecture in linear algebra, I expect that it carries me through as many important topics as possible while giving me the tools to form a good formal and intuitive understanding.

Sure and unless your goal is to do pure mathematics research, part of that is providing some motivation in terms of understanding applications. There's nothing wrong with a class on LA (or any other topic as far as that goes) spending some time motivating study of the topic by showing how it can be useful... even explaining how it might used to make millions or billions of dollars.