Don't complain about your stakeholders; instead, collaborate, then build trust

Sales might say "Don't bother us in sales, we're too busy selling!", which makes it hard to build software that meets their needs. In manufacturing, the attitude was the opposite: "Please work with us to make the line run better!", which makes it hard to prioritize and triage all the incoming requests. In both cases, getting into a truly collaborative relationship with stakeholders and key users, then building trust, helps more than anything to cut through the chaff inherent to the "feast or starve" alternatives.