Although the pilots cannot be blamed for not understanding the undocumented controls of the 737, one (multiple?) incident(s) were mitigated due to very experienced pilots understanding the fundamentals of the plane. Think of the pilot knowledge as a second line of defense, against an incident that should have never happened (again - not the pilots fault, but the additional knowledge helped).
I recommend reading “Flying Blind” for more detailed accounts of the precursor lion air flight that almost crashed.
On top of messages being non-persistent, it seems that chat representatives take a minimum of five minutes per reply. It’s unclear if they’re (1) helping other people simultaneously (2) performing a slow corporate policy (3) multitasking.
It shouldn’t take 5+ minutes to reply with “let me look into that for you”.
The average leisure traveler typically isn’t taking a two-day international trip. Airlines see an opportunity to extract more profit from business travelers who may not know their return date.
A significant example is Lufthansa (and co) — multiple thousands of dollars to book a one way to Europe, under 800 for round trip.