I don't have actual code. But when tutoring CS1 and CS2 students during undergrad, it was common for students to try to implement algorithms in terms of linked lists when they should have been using a tree.

The really persistent students would get things to almost work -- often with hundreds or thousands of lines for something that, with a tree, doesn't take more than 10-50 lines.

This is also an interesting case study in human behavior; the students were typically too impatient to spend 20 minutes thinking about the problem before coding, but could spend 20-30 hours on a single assignment. Odd combination of work ethic and lack of patience...