but then were never used by the actual users That's fine, The last thing VP's or management want is an employees coming to them and telling how they "can't" do

but then were never used by the actual users That's fine, The last thing VP's or management want is an employees coming to them and telling how they "can't" do something due to lack of a feature. Cost of not getting a job done due to lack of a feature is very high compared to cost of adding that feature. And cost of adding a new feature only when a need arises is even higher. It is hard to predict which feature you will actually need over course of time, thus the safest bet is to have as many reasonable features as possible.