AWS is total crap? We received great support and advice for just $30month extra with AWS. It wasn't emergency support granted but helped us with various cloudwatch setup detailsm
I've had the same experience as you. The people behind the support desk have always been able to assist and find an answer for me. Granted to get them to jump on it quickly I usually have to use the "phone me now" option, but the quality has been the same regardless of how I've approached them.
It really depends on your budget for context. If you're running a solo side-project where your database costs are $5-15 a month, paying more than double that just for basic support is a big pain. The cost of support for a single service might end up being more than the total cost of the rest of your stack (VPS/DB/Domain). If you're at a business then sure, $30 a month is no big deal.
Basic support is free. You pay more for better response times and more users being able to open cases. Having said that it is expensive at business level. 10% of your spend if you want the sort of response times you need in production.
Yeah imo. We have the biz support which is 10% of our spend on AWS resources. We only use it for emergencies or dealing with problems caused by AWS, not for help using the products. They simply aren’t that helpful and are never able to actually resolve anything - typically just provide substandard workarounds.