Right; the thing here is: the author obviously knows the game (because they wink knowingly at it repeatedly). Given that: why are they ever getting on the phone with a sales engineer? You can just delete the emails.
If you don’t, eventually your VP will hear that you are lacking such tool that they will tell you to deal with vendors X and Y, even if they don’t fix your problem. At least by proactively going after it, you can pick vendor Z, which despite having the same terrible process, at least it addresses your problems (until the imaginary limits apply).
