Horrifically broken was an exaggeration, you are correct. Much of this was written after a stressful day compounded by dealing with our CI failing to do the thing it is supposed to do. I also agree with you that Microsoft has been making great strides in the direction of "getting a lot of things right lately" as you said.
We really hate to hear you are having such a bad experience. The engineering manager has reached out on Twitter and included me. I would love to see what I can do to help
In the opening paragraphs I stated it was my hope that this gives me a gateway to communicate with someone that isn't support and isn't the void that is their robot response issue tracker.
That said, they generously reached out to me and appear to genuinely be concerned by my experience. I plan to keep posting as I run into issues and also as they correct my mistakes and also solve my problems.