Have you tried getting support from RedHat as an actual enterprise customer rather than an SMB?

Obviously if you pay for the lowest level of support, that's what you are going to get. Serious businesses pay for dedicated account resources. This typically includes a Technical Account Manager (TAM) and a dedicated support resource that works along side Professional Services to take care of your install.

When done _properly_ you will have nearly instant support from an excellent engineer.

Not sure who you were talking to but Red Hat support doesn't use tiers, cases go directly to SMEs on the feature and from there the only escalation point is the actual engineers working on the lines of code affected.

"Take 6 months" sounds a lot like "distribute the fix on the next minor update rather than doing so asynchronously".

If Price's law is at play, then there will still be more competent people doing the work in Red Hat's support team than Rocky's.

How likely is it that there's someone on Rocky's staff of 80 who...

a. is an expert in the code, and has worked on it on customers behalf before

b. is able to effectively support a customer in addition to fixing a bug

c. is awake at the time you need them

d. isn't totally underwater with other issues

How likely is it that there's someone in Red Hat's staff of 20,000 (or whatever) who fit the same criteria?

You'll need experts in kernel, services, storage, networking, filesystems, virtualization / containers. Enterprise support shouldn't be done by generalists, it should be done by someone who has depth in the particular problem space.

Red Hat (any many other companies) follows "knowledge centered support". [1] Essentially the knowledge base is the "workspace" or scratch paper of the support case, and as information comes in the case, the information should be organized in the knowledge base solution such that by the end, you've got the bones of a solid solution other customers can follow.

It's a whole Thing that People charge huge sums to implement, but the idea itself is pretty solid.

[1] https://www.serviceinnovation.org/kcs/

This doesn't really apply to support. With support, there is generally 1 engineer assigned to one customer for the life of the case. If a patch is needed, a software maintenance engineer may be added. You can't throw extra people at a support case and expect it to complete faster. You can, however, throw more people at a support TEAM and handle more cases.