When I signed up with Neon Bank here in Switzerland, I went through a process involving a picture of an ID:
https://www.neon-free.ch/en/blog/about-neon/identification-v...
https://www.neon-free.ch/en/blog/about-neon/identification-v...
I have a single proper horror story with otherwise flawless (yet nontrivial) Swiss bureaucracy - one of those situations where you are completely at the mercy of incompetent bureaucrat which couldn't care less, to allow just your basic existence in this country as a highly sought-after expat, since evidently solid past 12 years means nothing.
You see the process working on others within few weeks yet you are stuck there, without any info apart from 'wait', without any option to anyhow contact physical person handling your case, your main permit allowing your existence here expiring, yet the evidently lazy bureaucrat which sometimes picks up official phone for whole bureau doesn't bulge a bit, stating 'there is no time limit how long this could take, bye'. I tried naively to just go to the bureau but was literally kicked out of the building. Literally untouchable folks.
And then other bureaucrat by chance picks up a phone and takes a look after a year during one desperate final call, balks in horror and WTFs, goes on 5 minute tirade full of apologies (I guess I could sue Geneva canton for undue stress on me and whole family since that shit was real we could be easily forced out) promptly does everything in 5 minutes.
Yeah, using bad (phone) photo copies of IDs in 2024 is the least problem with Swiss bureaucracy for me here, there seems to be a lot of ingrained trust in the system (which is great when it works).
Most likely what happened is your case (in a physical form of a folder) was simply in a wrong physical place, forgotten, not transferred to a different case worker after a previous one retired/went on vacation/etc or otherwise slipped through the cracks.
Email response from filled cantonal online form came back after 3 months, with... 'wait'.
Till this day I believe this was an actual evil person getting kicks from this slow suffering of poor desperate foreigners who have absolutely 0 way of doing anything, even having decent polite conversation. And its hard to ignore the fact that suing an office which maybe will issue you most important papers in your life may not be the smartest course of action.
They say its roughly 1/20 sociopaths and 1/100 psychopaths in general population, not that hard to meet them if you are unlucky.