> If I put a gun to your head and give you an hour, you can't make a node that points to two other nodes of the same type?

It's easy to make an imbalanced binary tree.

I once decided that building a binary tree based only on a friend's explanation of how they worked; it seemed like it would be a good learning exercise for myself (I don't have a CS degree). It was like 10 minutes of coding to get it minimally working & tested, but then I had to work out all of the different rotations to make it a balanced binary tree (I don't know that an imbalanced binary tree is ever actually useful, as it could just work out to be a slower linked-list in the worst case scenario).

I did it once, took me a little while, but I don't know that I could do it again without having to reexamine all of the different cases that result in imbalance and the rotations that respond to each.