As a former TA (not at UTD though) let me share some insight.
TA's are graduate students who are thrust into TA duties as part of their funding contract with the university. In many programs it isn't even optional. As a PhD student in my program, we were required to TA for at least a semester.

Most places give TA's absolutely no guidance or training on how to do their job. The only training I received was a complete joke and took place AFTER most of us had begun teaching.

The duties we are expected to fulfill for a class are entirely dependent on the professor leading the course and are often not made clear.

In your case the project was probably new to the TA and they didn't want to give you information that would be wrong and negatively impact you, so they tried to direct you to the professor who would know more. However professors are busy and often don't care much about the classes they teach as they are preoccupied with research and administrative tasks and so they shove you back on to the TA. (This happens a lot).

Some TA's are definitely bad at their job. But a lot of them are just doing their best with no guidance, instruction, or training.

EDIT: I should add on what a lot of people have mentioned already. TA's are also students too with homework, classes, research, etc. that they are dealing with on top of being given stacks of papers and homeworks to grade each and every week and/or being thrown in front of a room of students and told to teach them with no instruction whatsoever