"it's clear nobody gives a hoot"

Bingo. Back in the day the person I reached on that first phone call really did give a shit _and_ they had the skillset combined with the authority to find and implement solves.

At the end of our working with them whether the person I spoke with cared or not wasn't the issue any more: it had taken 30 minutes plus to get to them and it was a very junior person who didn't have the skills or authority to run an ls -la from the bash prompt.

I'm still pretty bitter, obviously! My company ate a lot of costs moving clients away from RS. And in many cases we had to rebuild our credibility a bit after the company we glowingly recommended started failing to hold up their end.