You seem be saying there's a single "actual user", and that user happens to be identical to yourself. In practice any product with more than a few users is goi

You seem be saying there's a single "actual user", and that user happens to be identical to yourself. In practice any product with more than a few users is going to have to separate out the different needs, situations, and personalities of the users. Personas and market segmentation are two of many ways to slice up the user base. Some products can use that slicing to only address small niches and just say "to hell with everybody else". Indie games, for example, often address very specific audiences. Ditto a lot of books. Academic books especially might be written for an audience in the thousands or even hundreds. But products like Google are going for extremely large audiences. Inevitably, needs will conflict. They can try to sort that out in product, and I think they've done a surprisingly good job of guessing what people actually want based on them typing a few words into a box. But when there's a conflict, it's no shock to me they're going to favor the vast majority of their audience over the relatively small niche of persnickety software developers like myself.