There's a first time for everything. When I was at Red Hat, a customer (maybe you?) experienced a SAN-wide outage due to an error, caused by a rare hardware failure mode, that the vendor's engineers told me in private they had never seen before. It was one of the more reputable SAN vendors, and they worked with us on a kernel patch to recover from that error more intelligently. There's now a patch in the Linux kernel to gracefully recover from an error that has only been seen once outside of a hardware lab.
I've also talked to plenty of engineers and support people who had simply never heard of a particular problem before, because their companies lacked sufficiently well-organized support and bug tracking systems, and couldn't hold on to their experienced employees long enough to have someone around who knew what was going on the next time the problem came up.
In the world of enterprise computing, the law of large numbers is working against you. Some vendors understand this, and treat each novel failure as an opportunity to harden the product further. You usually pay a premium for this, but it's worth it. Others just swap the bad board and update their resumes. It sounds like NG went with the lowest bidder.