Is there any way to recover a disk's catalog directory after a Quick Erase?

Question

A disk's data directory seems to me to be the most vulnerable Achilles's Heel to protecting data.
With the 1 click of an accidental quick erase and format via Disk Utility, the roadmap to potentially multiple terabytes of data gets erased.
Even if zero data files were overwritten and all of the data files get recovered, (please, please correct me if I'm wrong) data recovery software can't retrieve the filenames, folder names, and the organizational, hierarchical structure, which then can only be painstakingly rebuilt by hand.
Relative to the size of the data, the directory is tiny. Wouldn't recovering a backup of the directory (that should always be automatically made as a fail-safe whenever an erase/format is done) make complete recovery fast and easy?
This seems waaayyyy too obvious to be overlooked, but everything I read indicates that with 1 click, it's gone and can't be recovered!
Is there any way to recover a disk's catalog directory after a Quick Erase?

Answer 1

This is not accurate.
The catalog on an erased disk may be recoverable - you need to use the correct software to look for it & repair it. SSD's will make this more difficult because of how the controller operates on the drive reallocating & overwriting entire chunks without any external way to override that but spinning disks should still have the potential for recovery. If you have more dollars than sense (e.g. 3 letter agencies) you could apparently use advanced techniques to undo layers of magnetic changes - magnetic force microscopy is meant to be able to do this, but I have only seen it discussed as theory, never demonstrated.
Tools like TestDisk may be able to rebuild the original partition structure, from there you could try tools like Disk Warrior to reconstruct the catalog, which could potentially recover the file & folder names. I'm generalising here because I haven't done this on HFS+ (at least as far as I can remember ), I have done comparable things on Linux ext3 volumes. HFS+ has similar features (like a built in backups of the volumes structures).
You seem to be concocting a solution that seems weird to me - saving a backup disk catalog when erasing a disk entirely defeats the point of erasing (unless the backup should be saved to another physical disk).
You agreed to erase the disk - the error here is yours (sorry for being blunt, but you shouldn't really expect Apple to account for uncommon user mistakes). Frankly people shouldn't be editing disks when there are non backed up volumes connected but sometimes it's a hard lesson to learn.
If you have a backup running file recovery on a deleted volume is irrelevant - you would always be better off replacing from a copy, 'file carving' or data recovery is likely to bring back old files which were not erased & not in the last catalog, potentially polluting the result. 
If you don't know how to recover & have erased data that you really need recovered take it to a professional company, it is the best option by far. Using & attempting to repair can lose more data as Kappy noted.
There are many other drawbacks with HFS+ that should probably be addressed before this e.g. data is not verified to be the identical as when it was originally stored to disk.
If you really don't like the filesystem limitations use an alternative like ZFS on a server, that has many extra features that better at protecting what is saved. Other systems also manage file duplication for redundancy & data verification etc.
Mac OS Extended is all we have that is fully supported on OS X for booting & all common tasks, so ask Apple to address you concerns http://apple.com/feedback/ but I'm not sure it makes sense for other users.