Thanks for the input but we run on Gsuite and haven't had a single problem compared to Office 365 which locked us out repeatedly because some rep in some outsourced support center wasn't available.

The reality is every provider is both good and bad, and you're unlikely to get any major support unless you're the CTO of a major corporation.

There's a big difference in moving from one provider to another (and having less problems) vs claiming that there's better support to be had with the paid version of gmail (compared to it's free offering).

I can't think of any product or service where you dont get better support after paying. Can you?

Question: do you expect escalation to a member of the engineering team as part of standard support for any piece of large enterprise software? Like Microsoft, Oracle etc?

No.

The small engineering team of 5 people can't properly deal with more than say 1 support request per day (since any request getting to that level is almost certain to require adding/modifying a feature or the way the product works).

Gmail has 1 billion users. That means fewer than 1 in 3 million people can have a support request that gets through to the engineering team without overwhelming them.