Wired posted an interesting opinion piece about user research, although its title is about startups and innovation.  The central point of the article is that startups often skip user research on the theory that they can fail fast and pivot to the next thing, and that this works but has a massive opportunity cost associated with it¹.  This paragraph quite nicely sums up many of the arguments against doing user research:

When the research focuses on what people actually do (watch cat videos) rather than what they wish they did (produce cinema-quality home movies) it actually expands possibilities. But a common concern and excuse for not doing research is that it will limit creative possibilities to only those articulated by the target users, leaving designers devising a faster horse (lame) rather than a flying car (rad).

Research isn’t transcription.  There’s a lot of other things that research is and isn’t, and the Wired piece is a great starting point to learning more about it.