How to predict romantic attraction
You are quite astute to have noticed the difference between your stated preferences and actual preferences - most people don't.  Yes, there has been a fair bit of research on prediction techniques and their effectiveness.

In 2008, in a study by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, participants were asked to predict their romantic preferences - what they found attractive in potential mates.  The subjects were then followed up on speed dating and other dating behaviour over the following month to see how their actual choices compared with their predictions.  The results showed that both men and women have no useful insight into their own romantic preferences that could be used to predict their actual dating choices.

A number of other studies examining a variety of methods for matching dating partners using questionnaires, physical traits, personality characteristics, dating techniques, and other theories of compatibility all failed to find a correlation between people's expressed preferences and actual dating behaviour.  Many online dating sites promote their compatibility calculation tools that are based on self-reported preferences, but research so far suggests that none of them do much better than random.