I think a key difference between what you’re describing and Knuth’s program is that those design patterns don’t actually serve a purpose, they don’t solve a problem and just add incidental complexity. Knuth’s trie is an actual solution to the word frequency problem that doesn’t add much incidental complexity — it just tackles the fundamental complexity from first principles, so all of that complexity is staring you in the face. Once you have well-motivated complexity to make sense of, you also have a well-motivated use for LP.