Bad engineers are only effective when given tasks that are interesting to them. Good engineers are those who are equally effective when given tasks that aren't so exciting. If you're at the intern level and you're already picking out which tasks are worthy of you and which tasks are beneath you, you may want to think about a different line of work.
While not disagreeing entirely with the core of your argument, an internship should be about learning rather than handing off the work no one else wants to touch. Is is unreasonable to expect, in a position which is reasonably considered a part of your education, that mentorship, controlled exposure to production systems, and legitimate work will be provided?
An internship is not some magical excuse to hire someone likely overqualified to do extremely tangential work for low pay, its a partnership between the intern and the company to perform work that is useful for both the intern and the company.
Its not about being a good or bad engineer, its about the work being relevant. Tasking an apprentice welder to change the oil in the fleet of company cars would be more akin to the scenario described: somewhat related but utterly useless beyond a piece of paper saying they did an internship at X.
Well, an internship in the software industry here is not really an internship. More like a summer job for CS students: intern just means you're temporary and lowest on the totem pole.
I certainly was given jobs that were considered semi-important but that the full-time staff had more important things to do.(They aren't going to pay an intern to do useless work) I still learned a lot, even when I wasn't coding because I was required to learn good practice.
