One may argue that a Phd student working in genomics must know the Monotone Queue variant because it MAY come up as a research implementation in his/her work. B

One may argue that a Phd student working in genomics must know the Monotone Queue variant because it MAY come up as a research implementation in his/her work. But this doesn't hold true for general software engineering folks. I am a Phd student in Computer Graphics and so it is a reasonable expectation that I should know more about linear algebra than my peers. But if you extrapolate it to ask extremely hard research level problem it kills the purpose.