Major Description
The results of this have annoyed me for some time. We should fail rather than create the collection node and only ensure the rest of the path exists if the collection node did not need to be created.
Currently, leader elections can trigger on delete and recreate a collection zk node that was just removed. I think there was a bit of defense put in against that, but I still see it and this is more thorough as well as a step towards the ZK=Truth path.