As mentioned in the article, you are correct in saying that users don't know what they want. However, they darn sure know what they _don't_ want, which is why many of the complaints are completely valid.
For example, Microsoft Office 2007 came out just after I started university. I'd never used Office before, and I spent a lot of time digging around in Office 2003's menus looking for things. I'd googled for help using programming languages before, but googling for help about an office suite seemed strange.
When I tried Office 2007, I thought that the tabbed interface was fantastic; I had a far easier time finding the options and features I was looking for. The more I used it, the more impressed I was at how intuitive Microsoft had made it.
My father had been using Office for decades. I excitedly showed him the new version and installed it alongside his older version so that he could open the docx files that people were starting to send him.
He _hated_ it. For over a year afterward, I heard about how terrible it was and how he had to unlearn everything and how he couldn't find anything. I even heard that all his keyboard shortcuts were broken, even though that wasn't one of the things that changed and even though he couldn't demonstrate any that no longer worked.
Users know what they don't want, and they really don't want change.
However you got one thing right: familiarity always trumps ease of learning, ie. the easiest thing to learn is what you know already. So if you define "good UI" as "user friendly UI" (as we have done, for some reason, for 30 years) you will find that the best UI is always the old one, because virgin users do not exist anymore.
We still do.