10-4.  That's too bad as I would love to influence them to give me special treatment (or, concievably, to correct my unusual treatment) by providing some basic level of customer service.

I probably won't bother though.  I'm not much of a redditor.  I'm guessing folks trying to decide whether or not to use coinbase are as likely to check the temperature around here as anywhere, and tbh part of my motivation is to follow through on, for the lack of a better term, threats I made during the process of attempting to convince them to pay some attention to my situation.

Meanwhile, unless they fix their problem with me, pretty soon, I'm already resigned to write it off and move on -- it's just not worth it to me, to turn this into some kind of ongoing saga.

To be clear, I wouldn't "write off" the whole $200 without a bit more effort to recover it.  I just mean, writing off the marginal loss, compounded on top of the marginal loss I've already taken, I'd take by buying my way back from coinbase-usd into coinbase-btc and w/d-ing real btc into the blockchain, and then, perhaps, taking yet another compound marginal loss should I elect to continue my effort to purchase usd with it -- but since I've had to resolve my short-term usd shortfall by other means, at this point, most likely I'd only want to move a token amount to bootstrap a relationship with some new exchange.

The only thing that really irks me about that path is, I am effectively rewarding coinbase, for their massive fail, by paying their exchange margin, not once, but twice.

They no doubt would think it massive overkill to go to war, just over that.  And, I guess they're right, I'm not willing to go to war over it.

But OTOH, it really isn't fair at all.

If I had bought, say, a mobile app, for the same amount of money as my marginal loss, and the app publisher had decided to ignore my support requests, never deliver the license I'd paid for, and keep my money, I'd /never/ let them get away with it.   Of course, in that scenario, I'd probably have a powerful intermediary (powerful in the sense of "empowered to control the app-publishers access to customers and revenue," iow, Google or Apple), presumably taking my side of the issue.  Quite the opposite in the case of bitcoin.

I learned a long time ago that the mostly uncensorable and irreversible nature of transacting in bitcoin by no means protects me from getting ripped off.  Instead, I figure a higher risk of fraud is more like a price I have to pay, for an instrument of exchange that's in some ways harder to steal, and likely to be priced by a much "purer" market process than that of the markets pricing fiat currency.

In other words, I am prepared to assume that when I use bitcoin there is a certain percentage of the time I'm going to get screwed and there may not be much I can do to fix it.  It's for that reason, though, that I do think it's important for people to shout from the hilltops when they get robbed, even just a little bit, especially by casino-type environments such as Coinbase, where you cash-in/cash-out and customers are effectively wagering whatever benefits they hope to receive there against the odds the cashier will screw them somehow.