I agree and I have stopped trying as well. I'm in bioinformatics and I do the big data, Linux cluster, data pipeline stuff. Then in the end I dump it all in Excel and let the very smart and knowledgeable (lab) biologists play with it. It's important that they play and have flexibility to massage data as they see fit, they understand the data deeply. I started out constantly trying to figure out what they want and build it into the pipeline... It doesn't work because often they don't know what they want exactly when starting.

Now I just offer handy things like pre-sorting, filtering (some boolean columns to allow them to quickly filter stuff), better column names or reports with extra info. I try to figure out the things they find tedious and automate them once and for all. But I hold back as much as I can.