In fact, 99% of the time the only advice you'll get is "restore your iPhone", "restore your MacBook Pro", "restore your Apple TV" and so on into bitter infinity.
Yes, Apple monitors them, but apparently not closely enough :/
Checking the dev forums was my favourite thing to do in IT class at school :)
These days, I get that (especially now that they're open) the forums are too saturated with content to have engineers on the ball all the time... But the Captain Hindsight in me thinks they could have done with some keyword notifications to nip instances like this in the bud...
Sorry that the free support for your expensive device does not match the quality of the non-existing support from your device vendor.
I could see how someone would dismiss a posting like that with an "this cannot possibly be true" shrug.