Do structurers need to have deep understanding about the market?
Some do, certainly they should, but it's not so much about the market as the customer's perception of the market.
Do they have to form their own views regarding where the market is going?
Yes, but they then have to ignore them.
Customers have a "view" of the market and more precisely they have a view about how that will affect them.
Thus a structurer is possibly the only person in the market who makes money from knowing what it has done, rather than than estimating what it will do.
For instance the Euro is not well and the banks are suffering as a result, these are current events, ie what you can see has happened.
A customer may feel that banks have been pushed down harder than they deserve (or not enough) and want some exposure to what he thinks will happen ,but to have a boundary to cap his losses if he's wrong. Also he may want a currency overlay since his reporting currency may move significantly relative to the Euro.
What would you sell him ?
To this we must add a dollop of agency theory, something missing from most MFEs.
The customer is maximising utility, which for a fund manager is not the same as being on some sort of efficient frontier.
The most simplistic artifact of this is that he looks bad if he loses money when other increase even if his average return is better. He has to look good to both his bosses and the people whose money he manages so there is asymmetry in his utility for returns.
Also to make it more interesting he has reporting horizons and wants to look good on certain dates.
Of course some actual structurers will read this and not recognise a close approaximation to their work since structuring is a very wide range of roles.