Story sold and unrelated writing group thoughts (#SFWApro)

First a big squeee for Leave the World to Darkness finding a home in Love, Time, Space, Magic, a romance/fantasy/SF anthology coming out next year. This is easily the fastest acceptance I’ve ever had, less than a week from submitting it, so yay!
This story was done well before I joined the writing group, but I did get quite a bit of feedback along with rejections from various editors and that definitely helped. And that got me thinking about writing group feedback, so ….
My group is sizable, easily 20 or more at a typical meeting. Inevitably this means some of the feedback is white noise: not that it’s stupid or wrong, but it’s going to spread out over the spectrum which makes it harder to utilize.
The last couple of shorts I’ve read, I had several people who loved them. A couple of members hated them. Several had specific changes, but not all the same. Some got exactly the point I was trying to make, others felt the point was blunt.
The thing is, like any writer I want as many people as possible to like my work. Sometimes most of the feedback is compatible and I can incorporate all the suggestions, sometimes not. So I have to figure out which suggestions to go with.
Do I decide the people who liked the story (albeit with corrections) are the ones to trust? Maybe not. If someone gets my point when nobody else did, maybe the point really isn’t clear enough.
On the other hand, it doesn’t always follow that the people who dislike the story are spotting genuine flaws and that fixing them guarantees wider appeal. Some suggestions just don’t work for the story at hand. The same is true, for that matter, of editor responses. Before I sold One Hand Washes the Other to Abyss and Apex a few years back, I had an editor tell me the protagonist was too unlikable. It’s a fair point—he is unlikable—but too bad; it’s a redemption story, and I needed to make him enough of a dick he needed some redemption.
What I usually do is write down everything, let it sit for a week (more if I don’t have time), then review. That’s usually enough time for me to think clearly about it. Some criticisms I find I agree with, some I don’t. Usually there’s more useful than not.
Finding ways to fix the problem … that, of course, is a different story.