But the claims that it sucks for undergrads are also folklore, as far as I've seen. I wouldn't privilege them.
I took Caltech's intro physics sequence in the mid-80s -- IIRC my freshman year was when they switched from the Feynman Lectures to Goodstein teaching from his new The Mechanical Universe. (Goodstein was one of the pair with the negative quote above.) I thought at the time that the new textbook wasn't bad, but that Feynman was amazing. IIRC much of why they wanted a new book and video series was to take advantage of 3d computer graphics; I don't remember that making much of a difference to me.
(Added: I also attended a Feynman lecture live, but can't fairly rate him vs. others because I'm hard of hearing and rarely get much from lectures. The lecture hall was indeed packed with non-freshmen, but it didn't seem like any of us frosh skipped it. This isn't very relevant since it was a one-off.)
I took Caltech's intro physics sequence in the mid-80s -- IIRC my freshman year was when they switched from the Feynman Lectures to Goodstein teaching from his new The Mechanical Universe. (Goodstein was one of the pair with the negative quote above.) I thought at the time that the new textbook wasn't bad, but that Feynman was amazing. IIRC much of why they wanted a new book and video series was to take advantage of 3d computer graphics; I don't remember that making much of a difference to me.
(Added: I also attended a Feynman lecture live, but can't fairly rate him vs. others because I'm hard of hearing and rarely get much from lectures. The lecture hall was indeed packed with non-freshmen, but it didn't seem like any of us frosh skipped it. This isn't very relevant since it was a one-off.)