Why aren't you spending even the $50 support tier if not enough for one of the higher tiers if you're dropping that much in usage costs? I don't understand why anyone expects free support when every little thing in AWS is charged for as a utility.
To be fair to AWS we don't need support often; we really only have problems when everyone else does (major outages) and we can follow the status of that online, we don't need to call someone to be told "we're working on it". Also our account manager is responsive and pro-active in helping us out, and they've put us on free Business Support trials a couple of times, but because we need it so infrequently there's really no reason for us to fork out for it.
They're horrifically expensive, and low quality.
It's really, really sad that so many startups have been convinced that it's "cheap" when it's almost comically expensive and lousy.
It really is truly terrible support.
here's a source, since you're attacking and disbelieving everybody who doesn't love AWS: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240203992/N...
The issue you mention (where you have to treat sg's as being immutable if you want them to work reliably) is another problem with the sg's.