Google has a shitload of money, they can afford hiring enough staff. Cost is a lame excuse here.
What is needed is legislation or some practiced standard regarding real-person online-id so that losing access to your email account doesn't nuke your ability to operate online in a way that requires you to verify your identity even pseudonymously.
That said, I have issues with spam being delivered to my organization's group aliases and I can't report the spam because it flags it against my group alias not the original sender (!) I can't turn spam filtering on the group alias because it flagged legitimate emails from our customers. So I'm kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, with no one at Google to talk to about it.