I think this lecture should be introduced much more early in the course. Personally I can’t work without zoom to mouse and checked on you tube how to activate this option back in lecture one.
Agree and disagree 
While I do think this is indeed very useful, I understand that not every useful tip can be given in the beginning if you want to quickly start doing useful stuff Assuming that people start to get real problems with moving around the view only now (with many models in the scene), maybe now is indeed a better place to give this than in the beginning … But yes, then you probably get many people frustrated in earlier sections.
Personally, I already have some standard way of working with the default zoom, it’s nearly automatic that I select the object that I need and press numpad-period. Then the zoom is always to/from this object (I think zoom to mouse would now bother me, especially as this zoom is limited anyway). Similarly, if I am in edit mode, I select some edge/face/vertex and press period to center the area where I want to focus on. As I was already doing this before starting this course, maybe my opinion is somewhat biased as I didn’t share your frustrations …