Their volume is clearly showing they are popular and they have something great on their hands. Is anyone denying that?
Let's also make a difference between poor, good and great companies. Good companies don't see the ways out while great companies benefit from sinkholes and rise higher than they were before. Polo has failed here. Their crisis is around for a long time. What stops the average user from thinking that if Polo wasn't able to take care of their scalability, how can I trust them on the security side? Or on the fairness side?
There's exodus from POlo everywhere I look.
Your quotes:
Also at this point customer service is just a pain in the ass for engineering.
Yes customer service is important but that's not my argument here.
You can't separate them. Polo is offering a service. All Polo users are customers. Tech and CX need to work hand in hand.
The thing is while you're in the middle of crisis you cannot just look for brightest talent, you just have to cop up with what you got.
Wrong. This is the most important time where you should acknowledge your limitations and accept where you can't raise the bar to meet the expectations. This is the most important moment to look for help from specialists. Especially when you have the means to do it (brand and finances). If you fail here, you fail bad and have no future. Relying only on what you got is a mistake.
There is no excuse in my books for what is happening with Polo.