Well if you're willing to push boundries, you can certainly do the same with TLS. Ask why the TLS spec does X instead of Y, for various subtle design decisions. This is probably actually much easier to do than with a binary tree, as TLS is a lot more complex and a lot more subtle. It would certainly be an appropriate line of questioning if you were hiring a crypto engineer, not sure it would be relavent to a security engineer or software engineer.