Thanks for the encouragement. We’re new to the partner program, so our experience has, in the past, been with regular support.
Ordinarily, when we contact support it’s to report a bug.
Our past experience (with regular support) has been that the support person pushed a beginner answer on us. It usually took a few interchanges before the issue got bumped to engineering. This time – through partner support – the bump was immediate. The first response from support was to acknowledge the issue and say that it was being worked on. And the solution was quick (fixed in less than half a day). So I’m now more optimistic.