Comment by uoaei

The simplest way I can put it is, be careful that you're not rationalizing when you ought to be reasoning.

The former is the main source of the XY problem, and comes up very often in cases where people are stuck and asking for help. The main issue they would be having is that they're framing the problem incorrectly in their heads and working through the logic of the ideal solution based on faulty grounds.

I would like to point out the subtle irony in responding to these comments with a meta-scale XY problem: you think your problem is other people don't see the Y for what it is (people don't understand my questions are really about Y and not about X), while you are yourself blind to the X (I may not be framing my problem correctly in my mind which is leading to my overconfidence that it is Y and not X).