Wow, that sounds very familar to my experience with support. 
@dtherio I completely understand where you are coming from. I too had issues like you are experiencing with support and along the lines of what you are seeing. In the end I gave up trying to have the Tablo do anything other then act as a DVR which it does very well. For live TV I ran coax to my TVs from my Antenna and I extract all my recorded content from my Tablo to my Plex media server using the SurLaTablo script.
After doing this I’ve been very happy and it has passed the wife test.