You have 2 types of aircraft carriers: direct and hub-and-spoke. Direct means that they either have a direct flight between A and B, or have no way to get from A to B at all (in most cases, of course no carrier is 100% hub or 100% direct). Since A and B tend to be routes like Marseille to New York there aren't going to be enough passengers to fill an A380, so smaller more efficient airplanes are where it's at.
In short: Big, huge airplanes make sense for hub-and-spoke carriers and don't for direct carriers. Small airplanes, lots of them, make sense for direct carriers.
For consumers, the difference is twofold. Direct carriers are faster, and they will be more expensive, because a number of costs can't be shared between as many passengers as in the hub networks. Hub carriers are slower, but a (lot) cheaper.
But that doesn't even really matter. Governments have decided that most airports won't be upgraded to support more planes and/or more passengers. This has resulted in airports that would normally be hub airports, like London, Paris or New York aren't hubs, because they are incredibly oversubscribed. For the same reason they become very expensive, very slow, and generally bad for passengers. But there is no competition, because only the government can approve airports, and they don't.
This means that unless you're a carrier that happens to be in a location where such government concerns don't exist, like in the UAE where the government is the carrier and doesn't care about the local population at all, you can't have a hub network.
So superjumbo's are threatened. Despite, of course, the market clearly pointing out that the cheaper flight almost always wins, if it's up to the customers, and therefore hub networks should win. I would say that therefore it is pretty correct to say that customers want A380s. But governments are standing in the way. For no good reason.
But governments have decided that having everyone pay significantly more for every flight, and generally have an utterly awful experience flying is absolutely worth it. After all, the alternatives would mean slightly more work for them ...