You are sure right I didn't learn that in grad school. What I wrote above is a *very crude* simplification of what I learned in grad school. To accurately calculate the thrust and drag, one needs to integrate the CL & CD with respect to the radius of the prop, for entire 360 deg of rotation with varying pitch, cord width, and airfoil cross section. As you can observe, a prop's angle of attack decreases as it goes toward the tip, and the cord width varies as well. So it becomes a very complex partial differential equation that cannot be integrated by hand.

I just applied the principle I learned in undergrad & grad, then roughly assess the effect of thrust that D, W, RPM, & C have on thrust and drag.

I actually first read about these equations when I was in high school in a book "How They Fly" when I started getting into RC flying.