When I went to school office hours was where you went if you wanted to get hints on what you needed to know for the exam, not to learn stuff. It was a means to an end. Honestly I never even considered the idea that office hours could help me better understand the material. Goes to show you what the mind of a college student is like.
I think this speaks to something in the OP that bothered me:
So much of the student-hostile elements of teaching come down to manufacturing efficient metrics for learning. They don't guard past solutions because they don't want you to study from them, but because they need to be able to report whether or not you learned the material, and writing an appropriate test question, especially at higher levels, is hard.
Likewise, you didn't view office hours as a tool to learn the material, it was a tool to game the metric they force on you to determine if you're learning in the first place.
Its very easy for the execution of modern education theory to slip into an ouroboros of perverse incentives.
Its also cultural. Office hours never even crossed.my.mind.
Who am i to take a full hour of the prof? Am i a remedial student? Ive never had to consult with anyone for my grades. What is this tutor everyone speaks of? My parents never had to pay for any tutor.
For me, the whole office hours its like eating raw meat. You know people do it. But you are not running on those circles, you donr go to those restaurants, and you dont even know the food name and you couldn't tell if it was raw meat even if someone threw it at your face.
Its a resource for those willing to take advantage of the system as it is set up. And in the odd case everyone does, well, eventually the service degrades enough so that one of the students eventually creates an app for it.
It's a difficult balance tbh. You have to struggle to learn so teachers can't just work through the homework problems for you. So they want to give you hints to get you unstuck but not give the answer away. What would be better is to work through a non-homework problem. If this is happening to you, try to find a similar problem in the textbook and work through that one together. They'll still want you to struggle but be more relaxed with giving you hints because they aren't just handing over the solution.
Not all college students are the same, I used office hours to get help building things, designing things, and to better understand the materials, especially when I got into silicon fabrication and electromagnetics, it was fascinating, learning exactly, in detail, how a PC works at the atomic level.
