I hear you - the system is terrible, when the schools are just given a vague learning objective that the student is expected to understand at the end of their training and you get questions on such obscure elements of it that nobody could have foreseen (I'm thinking dengue fever instead of just plain old malaria here, or the S-N curve in AGK). Of course, the schools are clearly mistaken in thinking that there should be safety oriented questions here - oh no, can't have that. The real problem is not that some material is irrelevant, you could cope with that if the questions matched the learning objectives.
When you have a system where the only reference to what is being asked is in the question and not the syllabus, there is something fundamentally wrong.
And yes, the standard of graphics for the annexes is often appalling. The excuse is "that's what you can expect around the world." I can tell you that, in Dubai, at least, the standard of graphics for flight planning is pin sharp.