Asking as someone with extensive familiarity with Cisco TAC, Advanced Services, et al... have you interacted with them lately? Anecdotally based on my interacti

Asking as someone with extensive familiarity with Cisco TAC, Advanced Services, et al... have you interacted with them lately? Anecdotally based on my interactions, the average knowledge level of any given set of 1st/2nd tier support engineers seems to have dropped precipitously in the past two years. Once you get to a platform-specific support group (say, the ACE group in Framingham, MA), the knowledge level is outstanding - but it also seems to have gotten much more difficult to escalate cases to that level without an extraordinary amount of effort on the part of customer engineers.