A partial victory, but it's still not really satisfying. Had I not taken the effort to blog about this, and gotten lucky by hitting the top spot on Hacker News, I don't think Amazon would have reinstated my account.
After all they did say:
"Further correspondence regarding the closure of your selling account may not be answered. The closure of this account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are opened will be closed as well."
I would still consider doing the PR angle with this ending as the story hook. You went to all the effort of doing a blog post and you got everyone talking about it here. It would be unfortunate if this wasn't able to result in some reasonable systemic change to the Amazon practice.
Yeah, customer service is expensive, but automating it all and essentially saying "fuck 'em" unless the victim can get outrage built is incredibly shitty.