So I got a response on my whole HK problem:

Dear [Me],

Thank you for contacting us regarding your issue with the HK-51 mission, “Assertion: Repairs Required”.

It appears that since submitting your ticket you have successfully completed this mission, and acquired HK-51 as a companion. I am pleased to see that you were able to resolve your issue.

I have forwarded your report to the development team, who will investigate further. I regret that we will be unable to provide you with further updates on this issue, but recommend checking the latest patch notes at www.swtor.com/patchnotes for information on any fixes or changes related to this issue.

If you notice any additional errors in the future, I would ask you to please submit a ticket under the Bug Report category, or type /bug in chat, and your information will be forwarded directly to the QA team for investigation. If you require additional assistance beyond reporting the bug (such as an item restoration) please also submit a ticket using a different category, and we will investigate for you.

Thank you again for the valuable feedback you have provided. I apologize for any inconvenience caused by the issue you experienced, and for the delay in responding to your ticket.

Please do not hesitate to contact us again if there is anything further we can help you with.

Regards,

[REDACTED] Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Customer Service

I mean, this is good customer service, right?  Responds to my problem and everything.  But they must be terribly understaffed!  See, I submitted the original ticket on 12/1, got an unhelpful response right then and submitted my “please escalate” that day.  And today is 12/12.

Because I finished the quest, I feel like I wasted their time.  I wasn’t able to un-submit the ticket because I submitted by e-mail rather than in-game… however, the reason I didn’t submit in game was because it was a response to an existing ticket that was originally submitted in game and that in-game ticket was closed (after being answered in a cursory manner).

I don’t really have thunderous applause or resounding “boos” right now.  I have learned from the response above that I should submit multiple tickets under different categories for the same problem – which admittedly makes no sense to me and seems like it would be annoying to be receiving those, but if that’s what they want, I can do it.  It’s why copy/paste was invented.

Anyway, thanks for reading.  Go download a wallpaper or something.