That's a really useful piece of feedback. I mentioned my dilemma to another friend today and he said almost exactly the same thing about the option A/option B thing.

The master's in CS program is, I think, after your time, so I don't think you would have met those students? I actually only heard about the program in the first place because a friend who's in Google HR remarked that she had been very pleasantly surprised by students from the program. I guess that tells me that (a) yeah, a master's only is seen as a little dodgy but (b) maybe the CMU program is good despite that.

I think what I'm hearing here makes me think I need to spend a lot more time thinking about how to get coding experience and a lot less thinking about how to take what classes.