To be fair, networking is hellish for a variety of reasons.
I took 1 networking (IT midtier elective) class in college as an elective and even though it was super basic in reality, it was very annoying in that nothing felt automatic, even though 99.9% of everything felt like there should be. Usually if that's the case I'd learn/be told there was some automatic stuff (Take a compiler class -> learn of YACC and they you never write your own compiler). But networking? Not really as far as I've ever seen. Sure there's some stuff, but it always seems to come around to "This works except when you need to know the exact details of https once a year".
Ironically I'm on the interconnect team at my current work. Even though we rely on shit, we avoid touching 90% of the stuff we own that actually does the connecting, and avoid setting up crap because its a mess.