I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”
The moment you have stubborn engineer who knows better than PM and user, it is really difficult to get anywhere. However if you will put such engineer into line of fire from a users that's suddenly not engineer's friendly PM trying to tell the engineer that this is wrong, these are frustrated people who would like to skin engineer alive as a punishment for using his "awesome" creations! That induces fear, but absolutely also crushes his ego, because somebody is berating product of engineer's genius like it would be a retarded hamster.
From my perspective, it is not about showing that PM is an idiot, it is about humbling your engineers. Their ego will grow again and this exercise will need to be repeated.
When I ask 15 users for their input, only 3 will speak up, and their needs and views don’t fully overlap.
Photoshop is a great example of a product that was extremely complicated and difficult to use but dominated the market for many years.
Microsoft has continually made updates to its products over the years, making it basically do the same thing but with unnecessary and frustrating changes, and people keep buying it.
Yes, UX is important, and A/B or similar evolutionary testing is important. Yes, devs tend to overcomplicate things. But, there’s no magic simplification bullet.