To the OP:
Your first mistake is that you went to a forum to figure out whether players know what they want or not, which is a major misstep. In fact, it's a horrendous one (no offence). Forums are actually a rather useless medium of analysing players (unless you're using it purely to see what a majority of people don't like - which typically boils to the top and can then be figured out quasi-statistically):


1) The written language:
Communicating through text is probably the least effective method of communication after symbolism. You don't hear the forumer's voice, nor do you see his body language. The only thing you can take at face value is facts presented - which we all can agree, I think, are rather absent with most forumers.


2) Players != forumers:
Forumers are most often players (of any game), but players (of that specific game) are most often not forumers. Even those who are forumers, more often do not participate actively in discussions. Long story short, you are given the impression that most players don't know what they want because most forumers who actively participate in forums, don't know what they want. You're making a classical inductive argument.


3) Internet introspection:
As a social part of the internet, forums suffer from the same problems as any other internet communications media in which people are effectively anonymous (or act as if they are). People will more often speak out from their guts rather than with reasoning, sometimes quite rigorously and randomly without any logic whatsoever - even though they may be very reasonable people otherwise. They're sooner to ridicule anyone that disagrees, than to look at the arguments and question their own logic. I'd go as far as to say that "the internet is where introspection goes to die". And you may quote me on that, haha. ;)


Anyways, I probably got more points, but I'll leave it at this. Cheers.

Also, I'd like to add one concrete thing:
Imagine a player who tells you that he hates a given feature. Well, does he know about all the various permutations of that feature to know perfectly whether he truly likes it or not? All that the player really tells you is that he essentially hates that specific permutation of that feature or group of features. But if that permutation is the only possible implementation of the feature that he knows about, then he's obviously going to say that he hates the feature and not the permutation of it.

So then the question comes up: Should you (1) remove the feature alltogether or (2) just implement it differently?

Just some food for thought. ;)

"I don't want feature X" is essentially the same as "I want a game without feature X" or "I want the old feature back".

Saying that I want the game to be different doesn't say anything about what specifically you want to see in the game.