"It’s as if they didn’t spend enough time to realize that they are missing the forest for the trees."
In their eyes, they have given you a problem involving a tree from the graph theory and you are insisting on an "out of the box" solution involving woodpeckers.
Let me elaborate.
Usually hypothetical situation is just a way to talk about an abstract problem.
It's easier to visualize and to talk about an egg falling and breaking (or not) than abstract measurements.
Now what you call 'thinking outside the box' is just attacking the irrelevant details of an imaginary situation which is there purely for convinience and can be replaced with another hypothetical situation corresponding to the same abstract problem.
In their eyes, they have given you a problem involving a tree from the graph theory and you are insisting on an "out of the box" solution involving woodpeckers.
Let me elaborate.
Usually hypothetical situation is just a way to talk about an abstract problem.
It's easier to visualize and to talk about an egg falling and breaking (or not) than abstract measurements.
Now what you call 'thinking outside the box' is just attacking the irrelevant details of an imaginary situation which is there purely for convinience and can be replaced with another hypothetical situation corresponding to the same abstract problem.