It seems like the primary issue is the lack of a single human account manager maintaining consistent communication while your cash is held in reserve. Perhaps

It seems like the primary issue is the lack of a single human account manager maintaining consistent communication while your cash is held in reserve. Perhaps the law should change to require interest paid for funds held in reserve accounts. This could prevent conflict-of-interest between fraud prevention and holding money to collect interest. Perhaps Stripe should offer interest and push for this law change since it will further contrast them with PayPal as the good guys. I had a similar experience with PayPal reserves and enjoyed poor communication and arbitrary reserve extensions after a six figure spike in sales. I complained to the state banking authority when they deducted refunds out of my bank account instead of from their held reserves — PayPal was clearly in the wrong and they corrected it after numerous phone calls, while still holding our funds in reserve. The CA banking regulators proved incompetent.