I can't say I feel sorry for any of them at this point, if only because of the patronizing angle these efforts are invariably pitched from. It's kind of funny that we live in an era of almost unprecedented market research, and yet the biggest guiding forces are based on things that research doesn't bear out but which everyone in the industry "knows." Things like, "girls and women can relate to male characters but men and boys can't relate to female characters," or "people won't see movies unless the leads are white," or "the 18-35 demographic hold the real spending power," or "women don't experience visual attraction."

A friend of mine in academia recently had an unpleasant run-in with a colleague who had decided he was going to be the first person to study fanfiction. There is a not-inconsiderable group of people who think so highly of their knowledge in their field that they believe if they haven't heard of something, it must not exist.