Activating a replacement gateway - surprise at the end

After numerous short-term outages and several custormer service reps, tech on the phone recommended that I replace my BGW320-500 gateway. New gateway arrived next AM. Circumstances led to a one-week delay before swapping out the gateways. New gateway arrived with detailed instructions for returning the old gateway, but zero info on how to swap out old to new. Searched online (what luck - I had service!) and found instructions, which made everything sound as easy as removing wires from the old and plugging into the new. Not. Followed instructions to the letter, but new gateway never got past a fast-blinking green light. Supplemental info also instructed me to switch to new network name and password, which would have been a real pain for all of the connected devices. Ultimately gave up and reverted to the old gateway, which HAD been behaving during the one-week delay.  After a couple of hours, the old gateway completely cratered. Tech came to the house, couldn't revive the old gateway, and proceeded to swap to the new one, including steps not mentioned in the online instructions. I watched, hoping that next time, I would be able to succeed at swapping out the gateway myself. The last step? Activating the new gateway. Me: "Show me how you did that." Tech: "Oh, it's not something you can do on your own." You can't make this s**t up. To be clear, the tech was great. The buggy product and the business model that attempts to thrust all maintenance onto the customer? Not so much.

And since we're piling on..... My previous experience had been with Google Fiber. Over the course of several years, I received two unsolicited notices of credits to my account because of outages of which I had been completely unaware. With AT&T Fiber, I've lost count of the outages, but the one that stands out? My family and our guests missed the entire 2nd quarter of the February, 2023 Super Bowl, after which we moved the party and all the food to the neighbor's house, which meant we all missed the halftime show. Credits? Nada.