"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.

To be fair, almost everyone hates it when you show them they are wrong. Especially in the setting where they are supposed to be judging you, remember? And even in normal settings it pays to think about how some critique will be received by the other side. It's a slippery slope in the interview... For me it would raise red flags if the flaw was pointed out in an inappropriate manner. After all, this is the person who would be involved in code reviews where sensitivity to other people's feelings (and egos) is very important.

> they are supposed to be judging you, remember?

It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement. But I agree: be respectful if you decide to drop a remark about the relevance of the question. There are enough reasons to treat people with respect even if you can afford to turn them down.

> It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement.

Agreed, I was being sarcastic.

It didn't come across as sarcastic to me, btw