I had Dr. Woods in Boone. She was the sweetest, most motherly thing ever but pulled no punches on teaching you calculus. I was glad I did it, though -- she had way more ability and time to help individually than any TA in Ames would have had, and she was very good and very experienced at what she did (unlike, again, a teaching assistant at ISU) and, well, was a native English speaker, which made the whole thing easier for everybody to survive.
It was no easier at DMACC, maybe even a little harder, but it better prepared me for some upper-level math, statistics, and economics course and the "teaching conditions" (the situation and the teacher) ultimately made it a more surmountable challenge. Central Iowa having those resources for high school students doing cross enrollment or future Drake and ISU students doing a year or two of JUCO at DMACC before moving up is a heck of a nice to start out.
Cheap, and the quality and expectations of the instruction at DMACC is really high. I will defend my experience there to the death. I came into ISU with ~35 credits, roughly half from AP and half from DMACC, which made killing two majors and a few minors easier. I was lucky to have a lot of those early "weed out" classes (calculus, American history, basic composition, etc.) in a 15-20 person classroom instead of some mega-lecture hall in doing that, too.
Also had Woods and agree with you 100%.