In the end, fiction is there to fulfill needs you can't in RL. But the needs addressed deal with everything from happy endings to rape fantasies, and there are so many types and genres so as to address the many different needs of many different people. And yet this much smaller, mundane fantasy--that we can communicate better than I believe we actually can--appears so universally in fiction, that I wonder whether it's a need we universally feel

It is. But it's also plot dependent. Any realistic fic involving a character based upon my mother, for example, would feature 75% of "What? What?" and various repetetion... where the annoyance would rapidly outstrip the humor and characterization value. And so, the actual fic would paper over that and make her better at listening to avoid that.