It sounds to me like we are forgetting all the other important things.

Like how easy it will be to replace that data structure if maybe the requirements changes? Do we really need to optimize this thing fully now? Or maybe for the next 5 years to simple solution will be more then enough? And so many other questions.

A lot people need to think longer then 1 minute to come up with a good solution or maybe you need to try or maybe you need to learn something?

Isn't that what we actually do? How often did we think that framework X is the best but after a while it was not that great? Don't we need to play around with an API to understand it better? Or let me read about that and tomorrow we can talk about because last time I was doing something with binary trees was in university because in the real world I don't need it that often because yeah we have other important things to do.

uh, not really.

In my world majority of performance issues comes from N+1 queries, I don't need people who can do crazy things with trees. I need people who write testable code, actually write tests, care about security and take responsibility for their code/refactor.

Of course you can argue that N+1 query fits algorithms part, but very often algos mean leetcode

But, since "you guys" always talk about data structures then I'd want to ask - how often do you use something fancier than literal basics?