I'm chalking your experience up to a Holey Tax.
As a good-sized PGE customer and business partner, our interconnection specialists might not get such answers as a challenging homeowner. When we do get bad answers, we press to a PGE manager to get other answers.
If you ever do a project where you have to deal with PG&E's Diablo Planning office, let me know. There are two folks there that are awesome, and two folks there that are not so awesome. Hopefully you can select who your approver is if you get the Diablo office.
I started with the not-so-awesome person, and eventually forced my project over to one of the more awesome peeps.