I always employ the 'Shut the fuck up' protocol. Unfortunately for my testing team it is usually me who is shouting it . . .
Right. I work(ed) as a software tools developer in a group of such people. Most of our users were other technical people, a high percentage with MS in CS.
They needed to know how to use many Unix tools, plus the domain knowledge for whatever project they were working on.
Unfortunately, each tool developer had their own idea about what was an "intuitive" user interface, thus our users needed to learn them all...
When a "Brain dead User"(tm) tried to explain why they had difficulty using the tool for whatever their job was, they'd say something like "But then I need to do XXXX, and the tool won't do that" -- And the developer would say, "Sure it does, you just need to do YYYYY". As a BDU for some tools myself, I got really tired of that answer. Imagine a mechanical tool -- that response would be something like "Sure it can, you just need to stand on one leg and hold it behind your back with your other hand" (Geee, why didn't I think of that?).
Eventually I realized this was another place where "The Customer is Always RIght" applies, except many of us don't understand the proper meaning of that phrase: If the customer has a problem, you have a problem to solve, even if they don't properly describe it. It may be a matter of educating the customer, but it may be better to educate yourself -- how do they think it should work?
I don't know about where you work, but where I worked, it was hard to learn everything I needed to know about the product domain -- needing also to learn a couple of dozen idiosyncratic user interfaces was just extra work. The result was that even if I finally realized what the perfect tool was and made it, I couldn't get people who were already in overload to take the time to learn to use it. Then I started trying to understand what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it, and then made something they didn't need to learn to use, it just worked the way they did, and did more than they expected.
Of course the next step for the company was retirement incentives for the experienced employees with layoffs to follow.