[rdtsc]

> But most of the time, customers don’t really want the the features they are asking for. At least not very badly."

It is easy to agree or disagree with that because it is rather ambiguous and everyone has seen it go either way.

At least, I've seen it go both ways. It really depends on the context and most of all who the customer is. Are they paying for the product, will they be more likely to upgrade or pay if the feature is there, do they know that feature contradicts with other feature they already requested and so on?

Even silly things like customer is trying to be nice to you can interfere with the process. Because they don't want upset you and they want to be polite, they might ask for something trivial and hide something more annoying or bothersome.

I have seen this happen with me and design. I know a crappy design when I see it. It is annoying and bothers me. But, at the same time I wouldn't know how to tell the designer to fix it. If they press me I might make up something like "yeah, change color to beige" or something silly like that. I can imagine that happens with any domain where customer might not have as much expert knowledge.