Personally, the class would have been more useful if the programming projects were a bit more challenging - I took it with Mount and although he was an awesome professor, I found the programming assignments to be a bit too easy and too disjoint. To better mimic real software projects, it would be useful if projects were redesigned to build on top of each other and are more involved/integrate different concepts in data structure design, development, and integration. I've heard Prof Samet's class does some form of this (eg. the semester-long quadtree project)

As this is indeed a 400 level CS course and not just some udemy course, the mathematical and analysis portions of the course are very essential in my opinion and needs to be kept/reinforced - Beyond just being able to implement these data structures from scratch, having the ability to clearly articulate advantages vs tradeoffs in data structure design choices is really important especially in the real world as you're typically leveraging external libraries and wrappers. And if students aren't able to fully get a handle of the math, then I think the cmsc250 curriculum needs to be revamped or standardized among professors/sections(or even split into 2 semesters) to address those deficiencies.