years back, I spent a few months on the healthcare.gov project, after Accenture took it over, while they were "fixing" the site. in order to show their new user responsive development process, they made us all sit through a four hour presentation about the project, including user personas -- and I'm not sure a single one mapped to a human being that actually existed in the real world. it was dozens and dozens of profiles of hypothetical people for a website that barely anyone could actually use. it was incredible.

I've made hundreds of useless persona reports, and they've always been vague composites of data used to make people think we are doing a)more than we really are b)something that maps on to a boomer's idea of a marketing company.