Do you remember the indignation--nay, fury--across internet car forums when it was revealed that GM would be using a North-American-specific interior in the Aura, instead of using the Opel Vectra's interior?
You're sidestepping here, but perhaps that was due to latent anguish over what most GM interiors are like? 
Parents rented an Impala. Bleh. Quiet though.
It's easy to reengineer the center console, though in doing so, the vocal online masses who were promising to buy your cars if only you brought them over unchanged from Europe become Chicken Littles.
It's not easy to take a European-market mass-market car and sell it profitably in North America, due to exchange rates and the inherently more expensive designs used in Europe.
It's very very hard to take a European-market mass-market car and make it appeal to the American daily driver, because we have different needs. People don't need to travel nearly as far in Europe, and they travel on much smoother roads, but the roads are narrow and parking is nonexistent. The roads tend to be quite twisty, so handling is critical. This leads to the popularity of very small, tightly-suspended hatchbacks.
This is NOT what most North Americans deal with. We have wide roads with plenty of parking at our destinations, but we have to travel much further (I know people who live 30-40 miles from their job). This makes room to stretch out inside the car more important. The roads are straight, but poorly maintained, so that "taut and agile" European suspension is just plain jarring for your North American non-enthusiast. In light of the roads we have here, the popularity of the softly-sprung midsize sedan shouldn't be a surprise.
I think you need to travel more of Europe. You make it sound as if the whole place is some old town with cobbled , narrow streets.
My god man there are lots of highways, large shopping malls with hmm parking lots, lots of straight, wide, and not well maintained highways. And with downtown and suburbs being very high real estate zones, many people live 30-40 miles from their jobs as well.
The main difference I see between the American consumer and Euro consumer is the length of time on average owners expect to keep their vehicles. In general as far as I can tell over here a car is not a throw away item after 60,000 miles of useage, hence the demand for better engineered vehicles. And the other difference is the useability of the vehicle, hence so many wagons, hatches and bunches of CUVs.
Oh and one other thing that has changed, the bloody euro drivers are drinking and eating in the car pretty much the same as good ole North Americans.
For sure the American consumer on average wants a larger comfy vehicle, but this trend seems to be fading with the high cost of fuel and the stats show B and C class segment with the highest growth in sales in the USA.
As Kevlar points out Ford has a very bad consumer perception, and he is just saying that maybe if Ford was to offer the consumers in North America what the rest of world is offered chances are consumers just might put a Ford car on the shopping list. Of course Ford N.A. would have to produce these cars in North America to make any financial sense, and Americanize some bits and pieces such as dynamics etc.
