Bertrand Russell argued against the use of learning Greek and Latin in the early 1930s -- for the reason that previously, the main source of education and culture and just plain 'new ideas' for people around the time of the Enlightenment was the written records of the Greeks and Romans.
Nowadays the bulk of new ideas are in living foreign languages like French, Italian, Russian, etc. I know that, for example, Spain is a large hub of the Free Software movement. Sweden has a big export on crime drama, France on romance movies. There are thousands of Russian academic papers with ideas that are still unknown in the west, because of the cold war.
You probably would have better enjoyed the language if it gave you access to things you found interesting, or if the culture contained something useful or interesting to you.
Or to see it differently, of course "It was a huge waste of time", you chose a language that has no cultural benefit to you, and was forced to learn it. And then you seem surprised that it didn't pay off!
As someone who took Latin, I don't disagree. Yes, English has roots in Latin. It also has roots in Anglo-Saxon and French. I'm not convinced that Latin has a unique pedagogical value for English speakers. It feels more like, outside of classical studies programs, a vestige of what a curriculum for properly-educated upper classes looked like a hundred years ago.
There's nothing wrong with many aspects of such a curriculum but it probably belongs as part of a classics major at a liberal arts college rather than a language option at a typical high school.
