> Would support have received, investigated, fixed the issue and uploaded fixed binaries before we finished our two-week assignment?

While I can't talk in the name of LW, as a former customer I can assert that we had not a single support case which took more than 2 days (where some have been hairy). The main reason is that there is no "first level support" - you talk directly with the authors of the complier/IDE/libs. And they fundamentally know their product and over the decade or two they have seen lot of possible misinteractions of the product with the underlying (often misconfgured) OS/networking/UI/.. etc. Bugs in LW are mostly in corner cases which can be solved usually with a small patch (where it's distribution is less painfull as in most other products - being a Common Lisp - they sometims can issue a patch even for a running system..) The only time their team needed about 3 weeks (where I'm not the only customer) has been, when we requested the introduction of a new data type in the language and producing a highly optimized machine code for it (try this with MS/Apple/Oracle or any of the open source languages in terms of money/time/quiality...). This has been a request for a change, a not a but report, which affects their compiler infrastructure for at least Win32/64, OSX, Linux and FreeBSD. I got the new functionality as part of the support contract! No additional cent, even it's not a bug! If you know how multiplatform compilers look inside, you will know that what they did is impressive and has been delivered essentially for free.

> Believe it or not our problems existed (professor included, happened during assignment reviews) but as new users we decided to just finish the assignment and move on. Subconsciously we felt it was a better return of investment for our time.

I believe you. That's why I still wonder why your professor hasn't taken action on it. While you can have been young and not enough knowledgable about CL, he IS the one who knows not only CL, but also LW. So - from what you tell me I see only that you have got a bad beat by being with the wrong situation during exams and drawing conclusions about the general state of LW, which is actually quite different (at least for the most of it's users) from what you describe.

> User Experience 101: when new users of your product face problems, they don't contact support and just leave as soon as possible for an alternative.

This is for sure true for mass products for unqualified public (for example an Iphone or a car). But take any essentially complex software (Let say the JVM or a helicopter or a bigger cargo ship or in our case LW). If it delivers real value - customers and producers often work hand in hand, setup organization and procedures to deal with problems on both sides etc. to resolve the problems, because usually the net gain of a working product is for the customer is higher than a couple of hiccups or some $$$. This has been and is still a working model for most of the IT industry (at least in the bigger part of the IT industry where products/services are payed with money and responsibility is guaranteed by at least through contracts).

> Support is there for people who already use the product and/or have no alternatives (which LispWorks has many).

Of course the support is for people who use a product :) And of course if the car breaks which you drive, even if you have alternatives, usually you go to a garage to get it repaired instead of just throwing it away and byuing a new one :) And of course there are alternatives to LW, some with great communities, and in all of which from time to time you also need support, as soon you are a customer :) But you know that :)