Dogfooding is so important, but so is competitive awareness. There has to be a good balance, where enough people are using your own product to find (and document) all of its flaws, but enough people are using competitive products to see bigger picture gaps.
I think you would have to be living under a rock to not have competitive awareness of apple while living in silicon valley or another tech hub.
You can get all the awareness you need from using the competitors product as a daily driver for a couple weeks, instead of using it 24/7 and being totally unaware of the problems using your own product that only crop up after heavy use.
