I can absolve nearly all instructors and students who have used Matter &
Interactions for the simple reason that almost no one gets to Chapter 13,
in which there is the discussion of heat engines, including nonzero-power
heat engines. Even in an honors course at Carnegie Mellon, with very
strong, well-prepared students, we didn't get to heat engines.
For that reason the whole chapter is a candidate for omission, yet there is
a general desire on the part of instructors to have in a textbook a bit
more than can typically be treated, to provide at least in theory some
flexibility in what to do from one semester to the next. At one point we
asked the publisher about dropping the chapter (and maybe putting it on a
web site), and we were told that it should be kept, for the reasons I've
given. It would however be good to get it right!
A typical course gets through the first half of Chapter 12, doing the
quantum stat mech of the Einstein model of a solid (a restricted from of
the ball-and-spring model of solids) but doesn't alas get to the Boltzmann
factor.
I'll mention that John has been doing very careful reading of our textbook
and giving us valuable detailed feedback of a kind we've not previously
received.