As a developer of over a decade, there is nothing more frustrating to me than having to provide a project sample to a third party vendor's support team in order to get an answer to what seems like an obvious question about coding with their product. I am quite confident that this is a common stall tactic that is being suggested to the support team by management at some level because I see it from all of the big vendors more and more.
Next, let me say that I am also seeing just plain incompetence with support teams not reading the text you have given them to reproduce the issue. This fact is easy to uncover based on the questions they ask me in response to my original inquiries. Inevitably my simple question or bug report turns into a fiasco lasting through several support tickets and calendar weeks and in really bad scenarios months. Whenever I challenge them on the code sample and say, "no, you provide me with a sample", I am usually punished by going to the bottom of the queue.
As I have almost exclusively been on the engineering side of the operations I have no real insight into these organizations, but my guess is they are underpaid and overworked and probably don't really want to be there at all, but none the less the problem remains regardless of excuse. There are exceptions to the above, but generally I find the exceptions rare and usually come from smaller organizations where the engineers work closely with support.
