When I was working on my senior "project" (I think of it as a thesis), I spent a year or two thinking up possible ideas, settled on an idea at the last possible moment (I think literally after the graduation ceremony), and then wrote the entire paper in 48 hours. And I think the idea I came up with was great, and totally worth spending that high a percentage of the total time searching for.
How I would improve the philosophy curriculum
Make the curriculum as long as it needs to be to cover the important topics, and no longer.
IMO it could be worth having students spend a full year just learning the LSAT, logic games, sudoku, the USA Today logic games, the process of deductive reasoning.
Really I should think about which courses I thought were BS and what I would replace them with.
The 4-hour philosophy-and-literature course, although that may have just been the professor.
Rather than stretch courses out by spending a ton of time studying various philosophers, maybe just cover the ideas they came up with and explain how they were mistaken or something. Like, when studying psychology, they don't really spend a ton of time covering the guys whose work has been surpassed. I do think it's useful to understand how the profession has made progress / advanced, but I think that's actually a different subject than learning about the actual content. It's like the difference between memorizing names and dates in your high school history class, and then studying history on your own to come up with general patterns in how history plays out. It's the patterns that matter, not the names and dates.
I thought intro to logic was useful / interesting...IDK if it was the most-important thing that someone could learn, though.
Many projects in contemporary philosophy are artifactual puzzles of no abiding significance, but it is treacherously easy for graduate students to be lured into devoting their careers to them, so advice is proffered on how to avoid this trap.