Even that is hard. App stores are full of negative reviews for apps because X app is not just like Y app…. when X app isn’t at all supposed to be Y app. Or situations where the user simply misunderstood how the app works and etc.
It’s so hard to get things in front of the right audience who understand.
I get what you're saying here, but part of any art program is critical review of each others' works. You don't have to change what you created, but to hear other perspectives on how it is received is important.
One professor told me how it is, partly, about keeping the artist from falling down their own rabbit hole. Sort of like the story about the servant who followed Marcus Aurelius around to whisper "you are but a man" in his ear. Highly creative types tend to have somewhat fragile mental states, and they can spiral out if not kept in check.
But from students the content of their critique is less important than what it implies. Did they fail to notice something you were trying to make obvious? That’s useful feedback which can’t be directly included in their criticism. The actual content may also be useful, but it isn’t guaranteed.
So it’s definitely a useful, but not necessary useful as criticism.
People naturally want to provide criticism, but it’s surprisingly inefficient without a great deal of context.
This obviously gives rise to picking an audience, but this idea goes beyond just demographics. There is no greatest book of all time only individual preference which doesn’t result in an absolute rank.
Commercial art is at best a compromise. No artist is going to inherently prefer exactly what the market wants directly, they only want the indirect things associated with that. Aka money, fame etc.