Public transit exposes everyone's full routes, anyway.
Metrocards can lead back to the payment card used for the purchase, and buses (which also record passenger ingress/egress) can remember all swiped Metrocards.
There are many industries where the workflow espoused in the manual IS the secret sauce, and, once replicated, can be replaced by a much cheaper product.
I agree completely. Just observing users stumbling through what you had thought was a blindingly-obvious, low-friction workflow is an eye-opener.
Sometimes, you have used your own code way too much to judge effectiveness.
Having a no-agenda meeting with users is also a great idea, but it is important to set scope on feature requests before it snowballs into a request for the moon.