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Does anyone have a sense of how much the idealization of circuit design limits people's imagination when designing real circuits? Are there fruitful possibilities that could be explored but aren't because the abstraction doesn't contain them?

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This question tests understanding of limitations of idealized circuits. Anyone with hands-on experience of shorting a capacitor knows about sparks and arcing that accompanies it.

"While in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is."

The effect is smaller than you might imagine, because many of parasitics can be modeled as adding additional basic elements and are understood fairly well. For example here is just some random model you could use for capacitor http://www.iequalscdvdt.com/cap_model.html

If simple lumped element model really fails to model your circuit, there is distributed element model which can analyze all sorts of RF voodoo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed-element_model and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed-element_circuit

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