All the big firms (Avnet, etc) have apparently fired all their "engineers".
The "engineers" were never any good anyway - not in the last 20 years or so. But if you asked for a price for qty-50k 0805 1% 10k resistors, and you wanted the cheapest one they do, he could work it out.
But now we find they have all gone. All the silly girls are capable of is typing a P/N into their computer and if it doesn't match, they cannot quote.
On ICs, you cannot say you want a 74HC74 is a 14 pin SO package. They cannot find it.
Maybe it's better in the USA? We use mouser.com and they do have somebody who is sort-of ok, but they are not competitive for production volumes; anything above 1000 normally.