Ya, nobody at Tata cares about any of this.... All of us who yearn for a rebirth should probably just grieve in our beers and let it go.
Just from my own personal experience of interaction with LR and from what I have gathered and known, LR, not LRNA or Tata, does actually care quite a bit. NA is a huge/major market for them all around. And from what I have heard, specially after D5, Tata has not been interfering with LR that much.
Its hard sometimes for a brand to get the real sense of what the customer wants, specially when most of us dont really have the time to communicate end user experience and expectations to the manufacturer in any active way. And if we do communicate, its usually in the form of reaction to an already revealed product and by that time its usually too late in the process for the manufacturer to go back to the drawing board for mods or any type of rethinking.
Defender is quite a bold step in terms of design for LR amid the current style trends/fads of unisex forms/shapes (the reason entire line of cars parked on a block looks the same today, varying sized eggs on four wheels).
A compact to midsize CUV today has to appeal to a much broader market, from 25 year old single urban woman to a 50+ year old suburb family man, two completely different and contrasting ends consisting of varying social needs and human behavior, much of which is driven by age specific modern day pop culture and trends. And thats a quite a bit of a spectrum to cover with one model. And thats the primary reason of some of the most hideous looking, tasteless and fugly designs you see on the market today, forcing you to wonder what the heck the lead designer was thinking when they came up with it.
To me Defender is really a great step for LR in the right direction and I sincerely hope that they do well with it. They have tried to address quite a few things with that model with whatever info they had gathered via whatever channels as far as what the customer is asking for.
The moment I reach for my pocket for that 70k+, I have Tata' attention instantly and their business now becomes my business, and to Tata, my business becomes theirs. Its always been a two way street, and very much more so in the year, time and era we currently live in.
Like any other business on this planet, manufacturers do not design/produce stuff for the customers' well being as their focal point. They are simply running a business which is one hundred percent dependent on us bringing our business ($70k+ each) to them. So as a customer you have absolute control over what you'd like to see happen in a product that you are paying that much dough for. And the manufacturers realize that or they will either be out of business pretty quickly or will not be in that business at all. They just need to be made aware of things from the customers' side which is the customer' responsibility.
But, as a paying customer, if you dont communicate to the manufacturer what it is exactlyy that you want in their product(s) which they are actually building for you and are solely depending on your money in order to be profitable, you instantly become an investing but a passive business partner, not only leaving all the decision making to your partner on your behalf, but also providing your business partner, the manufacturer, the opportunity to both set and drive the trends/fads that are better suited for their bottom lines and profitability and not for your needs and/or requirements. And then as a result, for your $80k investment in LR, you just get whatever it is that you get.