That said, I was disappointed nobody had added the corner stitched data structure - I found that to be a very intriguing idea (and in my world, it turned out to be very useful).
Absolutely, and familiarity with these data structures is what's required to prevent these mistakes. I think a good understanding of these is more likely to prevent one from using them, or in some cases, "inventing" them.
Though another way to avoid making the mistakes is to not invent data structures. That's what libraries are for, and anyone not using a library data structure should be able to defend why they're not. Odds are, they've got no chance of writing something better than what the libraries provide (or they'd be a library writer and already know these things).
1. An array can implement a stack or queue and is often cache-friendlier than a linked list of nodes scattered throughout the heap.
2. A hash table can implement a map or set for fast lookups of unordered data.