From a game development stand point, is there a lot to be loss if the programmer uses minimal data structures implementations ?

It depends. Certain data structures solve certain problems, implementing the basic structure is often the first barrier to take (e.g. an oct-tree instead of a simple linked list ). The second step is to optimize this implementation if necessary. Optimization bears always the danger of writing unreadable code or to introduce new bugs. Therefore optimization is often only necessary after a bottleneck has been detected, but AAA games often have a lot of optimization going on to ensure that the game runs at 30 fps

From a game development stand point, is there a lot to be loss if the programmer uses minimal data structures implementations ?

It depends. Certain data structures solve certain problems, implementing the basic structure is often the first barrier to take (e.g. an oct-tree instead of a simple linked list ). The second step is to optimize this implementation if necessary. Optimization bears always the danger of writing unreadable code or to introduce new bugs. Therefore optimization is often only necessary after a bottleneck has been detected.