I will admit I was being a bit facetious.

I work in a company that sells B2B software for developers, and as developers we do sometimes talk directly to our customers, it's a lot faster having a person on each side debugging the problem.

But our software does cost upwards of $5000 per year, so they certainly pay for that level of support.

I do understand why Apple bans people from helping outside of official support channels. Imagine how annoying it would be if you were in support and talking to a customer who is now telling you that an Apple developer somewhere on the internet suggested you try some solution that didn't work or even made things worse.