It's incredibly sad, but the above is so true. I'm still not sure where the fault lies. I tend to think the 'product research team' is legit and does take input genuinely, but that that product team itself waters this input down and more of less just does does what they think is best. That's the meeting I'd like to sit in, to gain a better understanding of how [useless to me, fill in the blank feature] got into the application, while bugs that persist for a decade or more remain unfixed.
Frank, I think BlackBox has a legit question, that being "what is expected to be done with this group that can't be done via the beta team?". I would also ask, what are the goals of this group, and would participants be compensated in any way?
Thanks for your post Frank!