How do you convince your team to prune features when users keep asking for more?

We spent months building custom requests to lower our cancellation rate, but it backfired. The product became so bloated that users started leaving us for basic single-purpose alternatives that were just easier to navigate.

It’s scary to pause feature work, but simplifying our UI did way more for retention than adding another setting.

Have you ever dedicated a full dev cycle strictly to removing old features, and how did your active users react?