> At their best user stories represent problems to solve for the end user, but rarely have I been able trace back a user story to something that an end user actually wanted because nobody bothered to ask them.

This is such a universal problem in the industry. It's also the source of the endless reinvention cycles we go through.

Everyone hates user stories now because no one actually does the other work involved - talking to the users to get the stories in the first place. So it becomes an unproductive chore and people grow to hate it. Someday, someone will discover talking to the user and they'll have their own favorite little way of writing down the conversation and they'll come up with their own title for it. It will start getting hyped and eventually we'll all be doing it - except we still won't be talking to the users and the next generation will hate it. And it will repeat.

It's the same with User Stories, OOP, and every other concept in computer science since the 50s.