I wish I had access to a small ISP. It is comforting to know that if something goes wrong, on the other end of the line there is someone with a Cisco shell open ready to run a traceroute.

For sure…in case of reaction times and flexibility they are great…Until something serious happens outside of their scope.

Like what? Their scope is being an ISP, i.e. routing packets.

Usually it‘s about standing, resources and options. Serious problems like fibre cuts, local power outages and DDoS attacks are usually not in their scope and they have to wait for 3rd parties to fix these problems with little iptions to speed up those processes. Bigger ISP usually have teams/departments which have well established processes/solutions to tackle these problems. That said, I‘m totally aware that each of them (small or big ISP) have their pros and cons - as always it mainly depends on your use case and requirements.