Well this is just untrue in my experience. I run a SaaS business and my customers love it when you ask for their opinions and insight.
Where are you getting your information from?
Perhaps you're only hearing back from the ones who love it?
Related, survey respondents are known to be weird.
This is a very important point, thanks for saying this. It’s amazing how many people think they can start an indie SaaS and think that all they have to do is build it, deploy it, and buy AdWords or whatever. Talking to your customers is more important than any of that, and it’s fun.
UX research participants are usually compensated, and so it's usually done to drill down deeper into problems that analytics found and test possible explainations. I don't see what's unscientific about that.