At least Microchip has a way to submit regular support tickets. I'm not sure if the experience is a whole lot better until you manage to get to L2, but at least there is probably more accountability and if the request is reasonable enough and you are persistent, you can often get it to L2.
I'm not even sure how "official" that forum is as a support channel. I think it is just people post as normal, but if you are registered with microchip email you get identified as an employee, which created perception that it is their direct job to respond to those forum posts.
This is one of the reasons I don't want to participate on that forum. It happened many times on AVRFreaks too - people assume that if you work for a company, it must be your job to respond to their every request.
It is! Happened to me some times, that i went straight to L2. It only happened to 16bit devices and fairly complex problems such as
- Documentation and reference manual non completely clear
- Compiler Issues (then confirmed as actual bugs, or them asking for even more info and testing on my part)
- Device issues
In some cases there were already forum threads made by me and already argued by/confirmed by other "high level" users and either the microchip employee already saw that thread and told me to refer to it, or they straight passed me to the guy because it was a moment in which i was sending a number of tickets, it was early days of new devices available to the public.
I wish there were more active employees such as mad_c, which is one of the XC8 compiler writers that helps us diagnose problems, or explain what we perceive as problems. There used to be george, which was IIRC the head of the simulator team (a huge help in getting the simulator doing complex things, and he was also benefiting from the hivemind for ideas on how to solve situations) but he retired a couple of years ago. I see that the MATLAB and the FPGA subforums have some microchip employees that post there, but that's probably because they are more highgly priced tools, so more money to invest to user care.
In the end having the public forum is a good thing because you can search if other have your same problem (unless you are so brain dead that can't conceive the idea of search before posting, these are usually the users that do not understand what you are writing as well
) and i want to say that a good 5% of threads come out to be gold mines because very knowledgeable people hang in those places
And Yes, it's good that with microchip you can AT LEAST send a ticket and have a chance of having it answered and the problem solved, even on asking for info. Most of my tickets were sent from my gmail account, not even work email.