Example to illustrate my point: Focus groups over the past 15 years or so have consistently told car mfrs that consumers want larger cars - larger cars are assumed to be more luxurious and associated with financial success, and thus are desirable. The end result is that previous small, manoeuvrable, city cars are now bigger and harder to park. Consumers or small cars are generally unhappy with this trend, as they wanted a small car for the ease of parking etc, but focus groups are frequently insufficiently well tuned to pick up up on this nuance.
My experience in this industry over many years is that users often don't have a clear idea of what they want, and in the cases when they do a non-trivial amount of time it's a so tightly tethered to one special-snowflake usecase that virtually noone else finds value in it.