I would bet many of the people at the top who decided to change the taste of Coke probably never drank the stuff. It's all marketing and sales to many of those people. If they thought they'd get more sales by having Coke taste like liquid axle grease, they'd do so.
The reason for the new coke was that Pepsi was doing blind taste tests and they were beating coke badly. I actually took one of the tests in front of a store in Chesapeake, VA.
Coke did the same thing with new coke and it was chosen by a good majority over classic coke.
People are interesting tho and they had a fit over the new coke and refused to buy it.