Everyone who plays is going to have an opinion on any given feature, and pleasing everyone is simply not possible. Everyone who plays is going to play how they want to play, despite how others think they should be playing - a sentiment I've seen on more than a few occasions. The best part? There's nothing wrong with that. It's those type of disagreements that spur (what hopefully is friendly) discussions and only serve to enhance the community. The foundation of UO is just that - any way you want to win, that's how you win. The player base is incredibly varied and come from cultures that span the entire globe. What's popular on Yamato may not necessarily be what's popular on Europa.
A perfect example of the varied popularity of a feature is the Void Pool. I've seen it said here more than a few times, "I don't know ANYONE that does the Void Pool, it was SUCH a waste of resources, instead they should have done X!"
I'm not quite sure what evidence you may be referring to, but we only go by our own experiences and the experiences reported by our users. To put that in the context of my Void Pool example, a feature otherwise derided as a giant waste of time, is insanely popular for our Japanese players. So much so, that we've had to have a real discussion about how to fix a problem where they recently did the void pool for over 11 hours and were stopped only when the server went down for maintenance!
Pretty much anywhere Ultima Online gets mentioned, someone on the team finds and shares it. Forums, in game meet and greets, and especially direct e-mails. We especially get a tremendous amount of email from players containing valuable feedback on a host of game features. While we can't always reply to all of them, we read every single one of them.
You're right, there's a good chance we are all playing the game differently. And that's just a-okay.