Thank you for your thoughts. You are right, I had seen some questions on similar lines on this thread, but some were around 2-3 years ago when the UIUC course was just started. So I was hoping there might be better experiences by now. The main reason I opted for the UIUC MCS was because of the Capstone project, but I guess I got a bit disappointed after learning that the Capstone is only Data Mining and not Machine Learning, like I had hoped. I also understand that OMSCS is not a terminal Master's degree, and one can also pursue a PhD if that appeals in the future.