I think you're reading this the wrong way, there's (literally!) decades of scientific literature about it, and it's not a problem of being condescending.
Could you me just a tad more specific instead of sciencing around? For example, I've read your article and its argument is simply not relevant
> Good UX research, however, does not ask people what they want. That’s because people find it difficult to put themselves in imaginary situations, especially in cases where they need to picture a future with products and technology that do not currently exist.
But this is a text editor, gazillions of those exist, with various UI paradigms and features, it simply makes no sense to claim that all users, even those very experienced in alternative apps (so nothing imaginary about that), don't know better than BBEdit's small design team, thus it's ok to ignore their explicit asks because you know "what they really need"
Like in the example cited above with removing hard wrapping, the quoted argument "The two states (hard wrap while typing) and soft wrapping have the same visual result and would tend to cause considerable confusion. " is patently false as there exist editors with very clear separation of the two (and those being confused can always disable either). But then if you think you know better, you keep being "utmost-respectfully" wrong for years
I cannot give you a specific example in this case, because I don’t know the feature, use case and problem… which is kinda the issue at hand. But the claim that “users are familiar with other apps, we should give them the exactly same features if they ask for it” is not very sound: first of all, not all users will be familiar with other editors. Those familiar might have had a very hard time learning them at first. And, in general, it’s good to ask “why do you want that? Show me how you use it and why you think it’s important, and we can test multiple design alternatives until we found something that works for you”, instead of “let me add feature X from editor Y” (both because there would be no innovation, but also no reason to change editors).
For the article, the relevant part was: “ In general, a researcher will first ask a customer to walk through how they currently solve a particular problem. As part of this investigation, they will probe at the user’s pain points and existing workarounds”. What is the hard wrapping used for? Maybe there’s a better way of solving the same problem to begin with, and hard wrapping is just a band-aid instead of the proper solution to the underlying goal?
By the way, UX research doesn’t claim that designers cannot get anything wrong or that users can never get anything’s right - that’s a silly simplification of course. But I don’t think the the BBEdit author was trying to promote such an absolutist view.
