How important is "delivering the content" of a course?
Let's consider your Data Structures course example. The material from there is used throughout CS, and more advanced courses probably expect you to have completed Data Structures already, and will assume understanding. If the instructor never actually introduces to all the data structures that the syllabus lists, then your later course will be assuming knowledge that the student doesn't necessarily have.

It depends what exactly you mean by not making content King—if you simply don't teach some of the material and don't mention it much, then your students won't know it. However, something to consider:


What is the goal of your course? To ensure that your students know the material so that they can build on it, or to encourage your students to apply their knowledge?  

If you want students to be able to apply what they know to unfamiliar concepts without your support, then definitely don't spoonfeed everything. However, it might be wiser to introduce all of the standard content, and then allow them to apply their knowledge on more obscure concepts.  

As an example, you could first introduce an array, then ask about a bitmap (which you might not cover in your instruction, so you can test them).
Will the material be needed later on? Would it be problematic if students didn't learn all the material? If so, perhaps it's best to cover the content in your class to ensure that they do understand.


In an ideal world, you might give students a problem, and let them explore solutions to it rather than actually covering the content directly. For example:


  How can we represent pairings between two variables in a data structure? Can it be done in $\mathcal{O}(1)$ time?


Instead, a lot of the time, the content is just 'fed' to the students directly.


  Here is a hash table. It does X, Y and Z. It is useful because W.


Given a large amount of time, actually rediscovering some solutions to common problems would help your students to think critically and understand why certain design choices have been made in CS. But you could spend years rediscovering things that are already known, and sometimes just telling allows you to move on more quickly.

Removing 'the content' completely from the course would essentially render it pointless—if there's no goal ("in this course, we will learn X"), the course wouldn't really seem to help anyone.

As a summary of my views: delivering the content is practically a requirement given the time constraints of most courses, rather than letting students investigate things for themselves. Perhaps changing this would provide some benefits, but the current system has emerged because it's pretty efficient as passing on knowledge, even though some students don't benefit as much as they could.