A few general comments on this discussion, although they are out of topic.
Regarding how to bring this issue to engineers attention: it doesn't matter how many customers have this problem and how many of them reported it to Apple support. Probably they are not many, so with this attitude (which is purely marketing attitude) the problem will never be solved. Engineering is mostly science, mixed with a dose of marketing when it comes to industrial production. But in its core it is science. Imagine that someone spots a mistake in scientific publications. A scientific committee with marketing attitude would think: if only one person reported this mistake we can safely ignore it. Sooner rather than later science would collapse.
Tech companies don't want their engineers to listen to customers (and I would say for good reasons), or to decide by themselves which technical problem to solve today (which often ends-up to happy engineering). I am an engineer in a tech company myself and I never talked to a customer directly. The technical problems are prioritized by marketing and management, mostly based on the reward/damage to the company and less based on statistics.
Moving to my next comment, if customers started turning to Windows as the only solution that they can find, of course Apple would react. But as I said above, probably a small number of customers are affected, so not a big damage. However this is not a solution. If (as it seems) the problem is in hardware, probably in components that Apple doesn't manufacture, other computers and operating systems will face the same problems when they switch to the latest technology.
My last comment is one or two levels above problem solving. To my humble opinion, the architects of the USB-C family of products (including a few generations of TB), managed to create a mess. Apple may have contributed to this, but it goes beyond Apple. In the old days peripheral interfaces used to be either too bulky, or too slow, or both. In the last decades tech companies entered into a race to make them stylish, re-usable and fast. Contrary to common practice, they change the body every few years, keeping the same suit. And this trend doesn't seem to stop any time soon. The intention is good, but it doesn't work like this. If you take a USB-C cable, or a cable which looks like USB-C, it may work (which is great), it may not work (which is not nice but still ok), or it may partially work (which is horrible). A cheap cable or device interface may not even have a rating label (or it may have a wrong label). Using only expensive and highly qualified cables defeats one of the purposes of USB.
When you design high performance systems for mass production at the limits of physical feasibility, you want to restrict the variables and the uncertainties, not to add more. Each new generation of TB should verify and reject incompatible cables or interfaces, even if they happen to work under some circumstances. Over the years, the USB-C approach converged to "try and it may work", which is simply unacceptable. The system architects may have defined challenging specs with the hope that they will be fulfilled by a wide range of products and wide range of combinations, but this is mostly an illusion. I suspect that each component manufacturer verifies their products together with SOME other components made by others, and not with a huge number of combinations, which increases more than linearly over time. Otherwise their verification cost would explode.
I may not understand the current and future goals of USB and TB. But I would happily spend a little more money to change cables every few years and be sure that they work out of the box.
