Hi Matt,
from my experience I can only say that it seems very untypical for QlikTech that you don't get an answer. Yes, there were times when the support was heavily overloaded (when customers were growing to thousands and support was still designed for only hundreds), but in the end we always were helped. Our way was and is usually sending an email to the support and copying two of our consultants; in very critical cases we also copy our sales contact, and he's always behind the matter. On the whole this always has worked very well. If you don't get an answer I'd make a lot - really a LOT - of noise, I presume you're also paying for support, and "pacta sunt servanda" - you could cease payments until an appropriate reaction. Though your sales contact is not support, he could and should do something about your issues. As said, this is not typical for QlikTech (at least from my view) and I hope (and believe) that it's not going to become typical for them.
Anyway a course would be recommended, though lot of special issues you'll be coming around will have to be handed over to support.
For a bigger (not really big, but bigger than our usually small applications) project we worked with a QlikTech consultant and that also worked very well. For a really big project we are also negotiating with an outside consultant (that's a real special thing not only requiring QlikView skills but also - and perhaps more - experience with the application providing the data).
So as you see we use sort of mixture of acquiring knowledge, but certainly with emphasis on support. I very rarely post questions here, I use it as a knowledge source.
Perhaps that helped a little,
Rgds,
Joachim
