Looking for study of (bad) effects when implementing user wishes verbatim

Are there any studies showing that a design that replicates users's expressed wishes is worse than one based on conventional UX wisdom?

Like, users saying they want as much information on the screen as possible, but when asked to find information or read the cramped page, they have difficulties to find the next row due to too little leading (row distance).

I've seen quantifying field study ROI and case studies to help sell UCD, but they do not deal with the user wishes.

If you're interested, this is the background of my question: While migrating an existing product to a new design, I often hear that "the customer wants this design", where I do not believe "this design" to be good. It's difficult to get acceptance for User Research, because the customer has already told us what they want. Oftentimes, my suspicion is that "this design" is requested because that's the way it is done in the old version of the product, and thus, we do not get a chance to dig down to the real pain points to come up with a good User Experience.