Learning anything is never a bad investment. It might detract you from an immediate goal but in the long run, learning always helps even if not directly related

Learning anything is never a bad investment. It might detract you from an immediate goal but in the long run, learning always helps even if not directly related. In your case, I say go ahead and learn data structures/algorithms as you are fascinated by them. If something fascinates you, go figure out why. To give you a specific example, around 2003 (wow a decade ago) when I was still in college, we had an assignment in CS class to build a web browser in Java and Swing. It was a fun project and I enjoyed doing it. Guess how I implemented the History functionality? I used linked lists to store the links that I visited. Not because that was the best way (probably not) but that's what I knew at the time. It was fun and I still have the source code btw :). Nothing like the real browsers of course.