> The the few times end users were there, they clearly did not give their honest opinion in front of their bosses. And really even folks giving feedback who use a product are poor at doing son.

Actually I worked over 2 years at a company developing in-house tools. For almost all tools/projects I talked directly to the end-users. 2 observations:

1) users become greedy when it comes to features (especially those users in supervisor/manager positions)

2) there's a tipping point with amount of desired features when users actually start preferring to use the newly developed software instead of a previous solutions