It's better up here... at least relative to m'erica land. Besides that, accreditation does not mean much if you don't do anything with it and since you find current top $chool projects bland and find your class mate's desires to become architects laughable, perhaps this is not the right course for you. You can hide forever in academia if you want, but only very few get to play fantasy architect rockstar theorists the others either work and design/build things, or lick their wounds as they pay down their student debts well into their 40s.

I also want to say that I don't think that grades are a reflection of intelligence. There are different approaches when it comes to getting the grades. School is a massive time crunch and ultimately something must be sacrificed, sometimes it's depth of understanding your subject, sometimes is quality of representation, sometimes it's authenticity. Sometimes the people who get better grades are the one's who are willing to do something you weren't. It just depends on your personal values and how that lines up with grading schemes. I feel like I've been on both sides and have personally experienced getting good grades on a simple more figured out project and not the best on a well thought out yet to be fully panned out project.

Just curious. Do you have experience working in traditional practice firms? Or is it straight school and School. 

Your specific statement "Why do all of the Harvard projects published on their website and social media look so unimpressive?" makes me laugh. Makes me wonder what kind of work you think is impressive.

I have worked at two firms, both of them were really good, not to say that did anything impressive there myself hehe. I know that actual design work is very direct and doesn't do a lot of deep analysis of culture/landcape, which is why I like school. I guess I made the comment about the Harvard project because I felt there didn't seem to be a depth of understanding of design conditions (not all). Like that they didn't break down what was happening and then manipulate those variables, they only seems to directly respond to one condition. Which is more like the work environment I guess. I wasn't shitting on Harvard, obvious the work the students do is great, but I know that different school have different time allotments for different subjects. Maybe some are more focuses on technology why others give more time to design. This is why I was asking the questions, essentially, does Harvard give the opportunity to develop long deep projects? Or maybe I'm not looking at the correct school for myself. I feel like I was more impressed with Bartlett student work for design development/exploration.

At 35, yes to your work-professional achievements > schooling for any incoming academic direction. What is the big question you want your research to answer? "The world would be much better if ___________ and I propose _________ as my hypothesis and will put forth to test it through (case study, action-based research, visual methodology, archival research, etc.) and evolve a systematic process that will benefit ________. In the UK a PhD is 3 years, US is 5 years. Coming in as a mature student and assuming you have some good experience under your belt you should base your return to education as to take some aspect to the next level. If you just want to putz around and do design then do a 1 year post-professional degree. The post professional degrees are not hand-cuffed to NCARB criterial and therefor are much more innovative with freedom to do what you want.

Thank you, this is extremely helpful!