I suspect Jason likely was as frustrated with the situation at MTH as many of the people posting are. Unfortunately MTH and Lionel kind of fall into the category of "Craft Businesses", in the sense that they are relatively low volume businesses targeting a fairly small, affluent market, and these kind of markets have never been known particularly for quality or quality of customer service for that matter, especially since there isn't really competition there, too small a business. One of the ironies of 'hand made craftmanship' and the like is that products produced that way aren't generally all that great on quality, and customer service is usually pretty crappy, too, because they are small businesses. Given the lack of competition, there is no incentive to create better customer service, it doesn't change customer experience, those who want to buy the products will, because there aren't alternatives. Note that doesn't mean that small companies are all poor customer service, small companies with competition generally use service to gain customers for examplem but if there is no financial inducement there isn't much reason to change things.
All we can do is hope that going forward things get better, with the current situation it isn't going to happen soon.
