Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

I'm an embedded firmware dev, so admittedly I am dealing with an entirely different list of vendors and asking for different things than the typical sysadmin or devops type.

With that said, it has certainly not been my experience that "having someone to call" actually solves my problems all that often. It's occasionally a nice to have, but normally I am reluctant to even start the process because my experience has been that it is usually a net drain on my time and energy to do so.

At this point, I am far more concerned with having access to source code so that I have a fighting chance of creating a workaround for myself, and failing that I don't want to contact my vendor so much as I want to replace them.