TAC manager here - All easy cases were offloaded to vendors. The vendors who take the cases are less experienced and care less about the cases. It's not their business so there is really no reason for them to care. But they are "less expensive" so Cisco doesn't care.
The internal TAC teams have been given all the hard cases, so now they are all overloaded and understaffed. And the BU's keep cutting TAC staff every time they want more budget for building useless features and initiatives. So they are also at all time low moral. They know the axe is coming for them at some point - why put in any serious effort?
The BU has to keep making useless features and programs so they can stay relevant and not get LR'ed themselves. So we have bloated junk software that has a ton of useless features that complicate TAC cases and do nothing for our customers.
You dodged a terrible working experience being LR'ed when you were.
How could they fix it? They could bring TAC back in-house. Stop the constant moral ki----g LR cycles, and let the TAC teams manage their own budgets rather than having to beg from the BU that doesn't give a rat's hind end about support and cuts support budget every chance they get.