[8_hours_ago]

This kind of stuff still happens all the time today. A few years ago I worked for a small government contractor which did a lot of phase 1 and 2 projects for the DoD. Most of the contracts we got were for developing experimental technologies to make soldiers more effective, which involved a lot of guessing what the soldiers actually wanted. After making a shiny demo (usually held together with duct tape, ugly perl scripts, and prayers) which the government PM would fall in love with, we would do field testing which would inevitably end with the soldiers reporting that it was a cool piece of technology, but almost completely useless to them. Anyway, it was lots of fun to work on those projects :)