You get what you pay for

It's a mistake to blame Hotmail for bad customer service unless you happen to be paying them. Their customers are their advertisers who pay for the attention of those who use their "free" email accounts. The latter is the commodity that Hotmail sells to their customers. To stay in business, Hotmail will do the minimum it takes to keep their advertising fodder from going away and failing to give attention to their real customers. Having a "free" email account for more than testing and occasional partial anonymity purposes is telling the rest of the world that your attention and privacy are for sale to a very cheap bidder.

One thing some of these services can be useful for is setting up baited spamtraps which can be processed automatically using scripted clients to tell where spam is coming from, in order to block the stuff that arrives at proper mail accounts more easily, but as Hotmail seems to tear the envelope and body headers containing the originating IP address off your email before delivering it, you need to find other providers even for this purpose. Spambaited Hotmail accounts and scripted clients could probably still be used productively for URL blacklists which make Spamassassin more efficient.