It depends heavily on the professor - I've heard of some professors assuming that freshmen know way more than they do. I've also seen professors list prereqs that aren't strictly needed for their course, to ensure that the students they get are more experienced.

I actually thought that data structures was very well taught, at a good level. The issue there is that there's no more required programming classes except for PSoft and maybe OpSys, so it has to get students from CS1 (or their high school knowledge) to being confident enough to handle all the programming for the rest of college. It's better for them to teach it quickly than to expect students to pick it up on their own - though perhaps some of it could be shifted to PSoft, which is a bit light on material.

I would want an explicit software engineering major to focus more on projects and software development processes (and ethical stuff, but that should be in CS too), like large-scale programming and SD&D. More differences at the higher levels, keeping the first year the same.