Disclaimer: i work sometimes directly for Oracle support, so receive money from them.
But on almost every SR i have to pleasure to work on, they drive me nuts. To bring the status of an SR asap back to the customer, they paste in the most fanstatic texts. Or ask for whatever diagnostic information. And ask first for the traces that have nothing to do with the problem itself, but take ages to generate. Or ask for versions, even when you pasted it in already 3 times.
But ok, that is the first layer of analysts you should try to go through. It takes time, but once you now their top 10 of preferred useless info, you can prepare yourself pretty well. Unless you do not have the time (P1).
It becomes more dangereous when they suggest out of context recommendations, that can make the problem worse, or can have impact on other modules. But if you explain why you think it is not a good idea to perform a step, and thus refuse to implement their recommendation, they will not proceed in handling the SR. Catch 22, or better, deadlock.
It would help if all of these analysts had some on-site experience. For all the money customers pay for support from Oracle, this is not asking too much.
Before i end this flow of thoughts, let me stress too that some analysts simply do their job very well, and just play their role as intermediate between customer and development.
After a while, you start knowing them by name. One hint, if your SR is randomly assigned to one of these that think that collecting 10 Giga of data is necessary before contacting dev, try to escalate untill a knowledgable analyst takes over.
