It's indeed dense and packed with many intermediate intuitions.

On the other hand, I still feel that the course is often unnecessarily brutal and could use better explanations.

MIT had a similar course on edX and that one was brutal as well (Computational Probability and Inference). I guess nobody figured out how to teach it the easy way.

I've been meaning to either take the course or read the book. I'm curious if you've read the book [0] and how you would compare or if you'd recommend one, the other or both.

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-model...

I read the book nearly cover to cover. I can't recommend it enough, but it's an enormous time and energy investment.

Thanks for the response friend, I think I'll order myself a copy soon and get working on that enormous time and energy investment. :D