Kids on the spectrum don't belong in mainstream school

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Yes, your experience and your father's experience sounds similar to what my mother (who was a teacher) described happened to higher functioning kids in special schools. While the kids are (to a certain extent) protected from bullying there is little or no scope for their intellectual development. This is mostly a resourcing issue. Resources in special schools are invested in behaviour modification which for kids who have severe issues is useful but not for kids who are functioning ok.

My mum mentioned not just Aspies but also high functioning kids with Downs, schizophrenia and epilepsy who find the curriculum in special school not much challenge.

My mom has said that she has always regretted not pulling me out of the private school I was in from kindergarten through eighth grade. It wasn't that I should have been put into remedial school, it was that the school was small (~40 per grade) and I had alienated everyone by about 4th grade. She expected the school to teach me more about making friends, but it didn't.
Even if I was placed into a new school, I don't think it would work. I didn't care about learning about making good friends until many years later. Anyone who told me in grade school that I should have friends would have gotten a rather negative reaction out of me, so I don't know how a special school would have helped at all.
What worked was finding good, caring, accepting peers who wanted to socialize with me and tolerated my more disruptive behaviors.

In my case, it depended. When I attended a mainstream school (none of which I was zoned for), where I attended for at least the academic core subjects the special education classrooms (the "non-categorical program" they called it), I think the difficulty of the coursework was comparable. They also knew I was skilled in some subjects and sought to challenge me in them.

When I was in the hospital, on the other hand, and attended the joke that passed for a class there, where I was placed with middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, the work was a total joke. The special school I attended around that time outside the hospital had somewhat more challenging coursework, but I still knew it felt short of what you would get if you were attending a regular school. When I was expelled from my regular school in 8th grade and attended the special school (before I stayed in the hospital), I found the ease and simplicity coursework was just what I needed (as I think I had concentration problems during that time). After release from the hospital, though, I was annoyed by the lack of challenge and anxious to get to my regular high school.