Re: #36
While that may apply to some majors where the lower level courses are not all that important as prerequisites for upper level courses, and the lower level courses are more difficult than upper level courses, how many majors are really like that?
In your cartography example, the foundational knowledge that would be a prerequisite for cartography of the world or a city would be the basic principles of cartography (e.g. how map features are measured and selected, and how they are put on a map in ways that are readable to the user), as opposed to cartography of the world being a prerequisite for cartography of a city.