Then we're in two different industries apparently. The equipment we buy is expensive, yes, but it is very well documented and has excellent support. If we have any issues we call the support people and we get help fast. That even includes loaner equipment when we need it, no questions asked (because they value our business and know we can go to one of their competitors).
Then I am positively envious - in our field this is not at all common. Lot of gear is sold with the tacit understanding that you are getting esentially something that maybe 10 other people in the world have and apart from a gross malfunction/breakage you are on your own. Virtual reality used to be a seriously niche industry - where else could you sell literally the same piece of crappy gear for 20 years for the same price, only adding an RS232 to USB converter when the serial ports went the way of the dodo?
Several times in the past year. They were able to reproduce the bugs and we usually had a new version to try before the end of the week with fixes for the issues we reported.
Again, very lucky - we have reported bugs on our expensive motion tracking system and they are still not fixed. But at least a lot of yelling got us a free upgrade to a new version of the software - with more bugs.
Let's say we had used GCC instead--who would we call to report a bug? Richard Stallman? And how long would it take to get the bug fixed? Sure, GCC is open source, but have you ever looked at the code? It takes a real compiler guru to make heads or tails of it and our embedded engineers wouldn't have a clue as to how to fix a problem in that morass.
Why would you want to report bugs to Stallman? Open source/free software != abandonware (even though some companies release their stuff like that). That there isn't a customer support rep you can call doesn't mean the software is unsupported.
GCC Bugzilla:
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/Bug reporting instructions (including how to produce repro cases, what are not bugs, common issues, etc.):
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugs/Fixing time - I haven't found statistics about average times, but some randomly picked, recently fixed bugs:
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=77748 (3 days)
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=77768 (1 day)
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=77802 (4 days)
The time is between the bug was reported and the last update of the bug entry - so it could have been actually fixed quicker than that, because the update date includes even things like people commenting on the bug and various administrative actions (like status changes, assigning developers, etc.).
I am sure there are some that sit there much longer, but the project is pretty responsive overall. You get the fix in the next maintenance release which are 2-3x a year. If you need it faster, you can either download a snapshot or compile your own patched version of GCC with the fix in it, which is not that hard, actually. I have built both Intel Linux toolchain and also bare metal ARM and AVR ones, no big deal, especially now when there are tools around fully automating this.
Re GCC being a morass - yes, fully agreed. However, it is both a huge project and also has a lot of history, so the level of "morassness" is not out of the line with other projects of comparable size and complexity. If I don't have to I am certainly not going to dig into it, though.
However, the ability to download the source and patch in a fix myself has saved my bacon a few times already. That is something I cannot do with e.g. Microsoft's Visual C++ when it dumps an internal error on me or compiles something wrong - had that recently with VS 2015. If it is a genuine bug, Microsoft will fix it, but then you may have to wait 6 months or more until the next Visual Studio update to get it (we don't have access to betas and pre-releases - and those often have their own share of issues).
Another such case I have is Nvidia's CUDA toolkit - it doesn't support the latest Visual C++, so I am stuck with some projects until Nvidia wakes up and updates their hardwired version check, despite VS 2015 being out for over a year now. If I had the source, I could at least try to fix that check. Or pay a 3rd-party to do it for me if really desperate. Right now I am at the mercy of the vendor, though - we are not large enough company to warrant the kind of special attention big game development studio or someone like Oculus gets from them.