Prior to the third time going to Genius Bar, I was able to reach a senior manager for Apple repairs in a phone call to Apple Support. And even after asking him to take down a note on my incident to have the repair tech physically open the right ear can, they still came back with "cannot reproduce". There was either a screw loose in my brain or the headphones. Guess we'll never know which.
Servicing is not done by Apple, it's 3rd party contractors. They have a rubric of possible issues from Apple and their profit margins are thin. I suspect contacting Apple support about Apple support issues would have resulted in a swift replacement of the item.