"Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart?"

A2P 10DLC requires all senders to provide company/corporate information and register their "campaigns".

Which is to say, when I send a grocery list to my wife, that must be under the auspices of a business case that I have registered with twilio and the carriers and within the confines of a campaign that I have defined with example messages and an opt-out and unsubscribe mechanism.

There is a sole proprietor option which is hazily defined and it is unclear if twilio even understands the implementation of.

All of this to say:

Because of the horrible behavior of both twilio and their customers there is no longer any such thing as programmable, personal messaging.

Personal messaging is something you do with your thumbs, on your physical device and programmable messaging is spam. There is no third classification.

Twilio could have been a boring and useful telco infrastructure company providing plumbing for interesting use-cases - but there's no route to billions there so they had to somehow become a unicorn. That's where the "customer engagement" comes in.

I'm experiencing the same massive pain point from Twilio. Our business sends survey links to about 300 people a day who have all opted in. We've been doing this for 7 years. Our undelivered rate had been under 5% for years. It's now at 33% and is threatening our business.

Twilio's support has been absolutely dismal. They say things like "Your number is not attached to your campaign" and show a screen shot from their admin screen, but when I point out it is all connected in the console: they respond with the generic Twilio links about A2P implementation.

Has anyone figured out a solution? ... I'm happy to switch to another company at this point.

I assume they are talking about a2p 10dlc registration. Twilio has badly mishandled the rollout, it's been extremely painful. OP seems to blame them for making things too easy for spammers which caused the changes to be needed, which may be true.