Personas: imaginary friends for software developers

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In the beginning there were user stories.
Well, actually in the beginning there were requirements, but that was too easy, so it came to pass that everything had to be phrased using the following snowclone:

"As an X, I want to Y."

where X is some kind of user and Y was something you could sell. This was easy enough to subvert:

"As Dave, the IT guy, I want customers to stop yelling at me about our terrible software."

But somewhere along the line, some daydreamer had a thought bubble in which the following words appeared: "What about the users of these so-called 'user stories'?"
Now, instead of having a simple requirement or even a user story, you create an entire fake human being, with their own thoughts and dreams and needs. In fact, you create several such humans, and the user stories are attached to them. After you've done that, you hope that all of your requirements were attached in at least one of these fake people, otherwise it'll fall through the cracks, never to...