Who doesn't love customer support?

So anyway, I'm the point-of-contact at our company for a specific tool we use, sold by an external vendor, whose yearly licenses cost five-digits per user. I've been the point of contact for around three years now, and most of the time it's people way more senior than me asking for help with [specific edge case] and I send them on their way with the solution. Sometimes that isn't the case though, and I need to send an email off to [vendor]'s support team.

Good support is lovely. Our go-to guy on their support team was great. Timely responses, thorough, and always willing to dig to the bottom of the case. Sometimes it's us being stupid and not knowing what the [obscure feature] toggle does, sometimes it's just a mis-match between what we're trying to do and how the tool was designed, and sometimes it's a sneaky, devious bug in their product. I still remember the pride I felt when we got an email notification for the latest release of the tool that contained a bugfix that I had gone over with their dev team on call to figure out how to reproduce.

However, just over a year ago they changed our go-to guy. It started off small. The new guy was more terse in his responses. Less attentive to the little details in the message. Gather as much information as possible first, deal with the actual problem we were having second. He'd fix the immediate problem, but more open-ended questions about best practices to avoid another mess in the future would be ignored.

But slowly it got worse. Less responsive. Entire paragraphs of context would be ignored and had to be repeated to him. More generic responses. The odd case got dropped entirely. Last time I opened a support ticket, when I asked for additional clarification I got a ChatGPT-ass response only tangentially related to the actual context of my question (you could tell it was copy-pasted because he didn't even bother to paste without formatting).

Now upper management is unhappy with [tool] and are on my ass to get them to solve all our problems with it. What does new support guy reply with to my ticket with clearly bulleted questions, written in bold to separate them for clarity from the surrounding context? A two-line, nonspecific request for information entirely unrelated to the issue at hand, to the point that me and everybody from my company in cc privately went "why the fuck would we even send that??".

These next few weeks are going to be fucking rough, dear god may this be over soon.