You've just made the same point that I was talking about: you haven't said that there's anything wrong with design thinking, only with people who don't know how to do research doing design thinking. You literally said that if a non-scientist tries to do a bullet-point version of the scientific method, it's probably going to fail - but what you didn't say, and that's my point, is that there's anything wrong with the scientific method when scientists do it.

To take your point about how many users, where and how - that's why we have professional researchers on the team because it depends, it depends and it depends. We didn't get good results because Johnny from Operations put post-it notes on the wall; we got good results because researchers with PhDs and years of experience put post-it notes on the wall.

If you work for a global behemoth with multi-year development cycles, massive abstract research projects that result in wordy reports that sit on a shelf somewhere, and a huge well-funded research department, then design thinking probably IS better than what you're doing, provided that you get your researchers to do it.