As Mathworks customer, I've come to hate this, since this involves talking to clueless people with superficial information. Every question that involves something slightly more complex is dispatched to deeper support levels and regurgitated in a more or less screwed up way to me by the tier one guy/gal.
I'm sorry your experiences have been less than positive. When I worked there I followed the path that I described above, and the other Tier I folks I worked with were nearly all smart and helpful. And whenever the customer had complex support questions and it was clear they were clued-in themselves, we usually were able to hand them over to the Tier IIIs to work things out directly between them.
