Years ago we had an open session for how to display some unintuitive data on one of our websites, and while few outside the dev team participated, theirs combined with devs' ideas resulted in around 5-10 totally different designs. Mine was one of the first eliminated, most people thought it was weird and confusing. Four months later, after developing and putting the two top-voted ones in front of users and finding they still didn't understand it, our designer came up with basically what I originally suggested, with a few tweaks to make it look nicer. We've kept that version since then.

That was a frustrating period.