Well, see, (1) you didn't say you were in a class or left a class. You said you heard stuff around training during 'classes 125 and 126', which makes it unclear, and (2) nobody here has said we chase down fires all day, but we get a lot more fires, even serious, active structure fires, etc than the way you're characterizing it. Fires aren't all we do though, by a long shot. 60-70% of our calls are medical, and the fire department gets all the calls nobody else wants or knows how to handle. And nobody's disagreeing that there are some not-so-shining examples of 'the perfect employee' working in the fire service or in AFD, but you're taking your very small sampling of AFD that you got at training and a handful of incidents across several years, and applying it to the entire department and the entire fire service. Every department has those people going against the values of the profession, as does every profession, and we're always trying to keep them out or get them out if they get in. Training is Training, but what you experience there is not what you experience out in the 'real world' of the fire department.
I'm not astonished and wasn't acting that way. What's weird is you projecting onto the entire fire service your narrow view that you formed in what was apparently not even an entire training academy term. Yeah I know about Devon Coney's death, which was horrible. A lot of AFD people knew Devon before he got in the academy. As Bob Nicks said in the article you linked, even though he was screened per fire service standards for incoming cadets, AFD learned from that and set about doing more than the national standard - which is typical of how AFD and some other departments work. I know about the crap that happened 7 years ago at station 15 at the hands of one bad actor, etc. That was all beyond despicable, but once he was found out, he was dealt with and was drummed out of the fire service because of it. In the old days, nobody would have ever heard about it.
Painting the whole fire department and/or fire service with a broad brush based on your extremely limited experience and the actions of a handful of individuals is idiotic. If you're going to do that, you'll never find a single line of work that isn't 40-60-70% assholes in your mind. But hey, maybe you're right and we're all wrong.