Its true that there are parts of the course that can make you feel unmotivated (doesn't that happen on every course?) but you just have to stick at it as it will be worth it (assuming your still doing the course). That being said I disagree with you on the other parts, why did you bother with taking the course when you have self studied everything/know quite a lot about the subject already? truth be told, you wouldn't have been able to enjoy any course if you know about the course content already.
The Applied ICT that I did with Edexcel included some programming which is hard to get your head around at first if you have no knowledge about it whatsoever from the start. Yes there is A LOT of coursework within the course (if you want to get high grades that is) I wrote a 8000 word essay for unit 6 which was only 1 part of the unit. It was very hard but I was well pleased when I finished it and got an A
The course is very good for setting you up for uni as it is a very academic but practical course if that makes sense. In the AS year I got a AB overall and then, in the A2 year I got a BB overall (as I did badly in the two exams at A2). If you think it was easy then you obviously didn't try hard enough as you would have come out with A*A* :-P
In fact the Networking exam was the hardest unit as even our tutor said that the stuff we were learning was no different from foundation degree stuff........no wonder we found it difficult lol.
Like one of the posters above said, it depends on the college and exam board. If you are looking for a challenging, fun (most of the time) and a broad range of topics in IT, then the Applied ICT is certainly for you.
Edit: I noticed that you used MS frontpage too the the website development unit. I must say that this was the only part of the course that let it down, as like you said it isn't used at all now by developers....we did have the option of using dreamweaver though however you only could used that while at college and it just wasn't possible to do the coursework in college time (to get high grades). Therefore the only alternative was to use the colleges MS frontpage (also known as MS Sharepoint Designer 2007), I feel that if they taught us HTML and CSS to create our websites it would have truely have been a GREAT GREAT course. I can see however how most students would have struggled to hand in on time if they did this.
We did learn some HTML though (it was more SEO) which was a good history lesson about SEO although it did include one or two SEO techniques that still exist
If you are taking this course and want to get into web development then I would strongly advise you take a Web Development course alongside this course for example taking the Btec Sub Diploma in Web Development (equivalent to 1 A level) as this will teach you html and css that is missing sadly in the Applied ICT course.