They have basically done the same thing with software assurance support recently. A few years ago when we had a SQL issue in pre-deployment testing we opened a ticket and spoke to an engineer who knew what they were doing. Last year when we did that we had a 1x/day email back and forth with an out-of-country third party contractor who ultimately was unable to help us in any way. We ended up figuring it out ourselves (that Visual Studio version somehow conflicted with that SQL version such that data errors would get introduced (WTF!?)) while said support contractor was still trying to get in touch with real actual SQL engineers for us.