Wouldn't it be more important to have people to come up with brilliant solutions on problems they are working on, rather than hard problems in general that have already been solved?
For example, I have M time slots and N people that need to be scheduled. Each of the N people has a time schedule for the M slots (either free or busy). If a person doesn't know about bipartite graph matching (or even graphs at all), then they're less likely to come up with a polynomial-runtime solution. Now, if a person knows about bipartite matching, they might as well learn the algorithms (max flow, etc) to solve it (even for fun, at least I know I would).
After all a timely - "This is not going to work well because there will be lots of branch mispredictions and you will be going out of the L3 cache a lot, and RAM is terribly slow" can save a lot of time and effort for some classes of tasks that big scalabiliy companies have to deal often.
Most of the times the guys that can come with "brilliant solutions" on new problems are those that know the solved problems inside and out.
The other guys just keep reinventing the wheel (only worse).