C'mon, dude, we're talking about SMT resistors, which I'm sure are already used elsewhere in their design. If any electronics company in the world can't "secure" a supply of SMT resistors, we have much bigger problems.
I agree that doing even a small redesign of something existing isn't free, but every company comes out with new designs for new products or to make an existing product more cheaply. At the very least they could acknowledge the issue and put the fix on the queue for the next rev of the board.
My guess is that the support person didn't actually forward anything on to any engineering team. At most they sent it to their supervisor, who told them to just make OP go away.