Given the vast amount of material in the QM course (at least the course taught by Prof. Dauncey) I think it would be difficult to spend enough time really emphasising dirac notation. Although personally I only began to feel comfortable doing QM after sitting the Foundations of QM course. This is because it is easy starting from linear vector spaces moving to Dirac notation and then learning the rules of QM & the Schrodinger Equation. Then the recipes for doing QM just seemed more natural than starting off from the wave picture. Eigenstates made more sense as you could make an analogy with a basis set of vectors. Of course time spent on the formalism comes at a cost of time spent teaching the physics. Also something which isn't emphasised in second year enough is that not just arrows in space form a vector space (i.e. functions and quantum states also form a vector space). So it takes a while (if ever) for it to click that fourier series and quantum states can be viewed as being decomposed into a set of orthogonal vectors/functions/states.