"Good design" is not what I would call optimization.

As a contrived example: there are specific cases when a particular non-quicksort algorithm is optimal. In almost all real world scenarios, though, you're just going to say fuck it and use quicksort until profiling determines that the sort is the bottleneck.

Unless you already have specific knowledge that your data comes in a particular shape, defaulting to quicksort is good design (IMHO). Worrying about pathological sorting before you've seen benchmarks is premature optimization.