Yes, a lot of awful practices have always been a thing.
> e.g. hook in a senior engineer that you know is intimate with the system.
unless, of course, you don't know said engineer because you don't even work in the same company, you're a just a user seeing a problem in an app you use
> unless, of course, you don't know said engineer because you don't even work in the same company...
Or they work in a different part of the fairly-large company that you both work for.
I guess emmelaich either missed the part of my commentary where I talked about handling inter-organization communication, and/or has never worked at a company where it's simply impossible to know everyone who could reasonably be relevant to the stuff that the company works on.
So put out feelers. Ask everyone if they know anyone....
At least triage it with your best effort.