I concur with you - but I haven't had any situations where I have needed special service (eg delayed flights, missed connections etc).
I had one pretty bad incident there (inbound aircraft depressurization
described here). There was no aircraft to fly CX881 back to HKG, so they put us up in a hotel for the night and flew us out the next day.
I thought the LAX staff handled it admirably. It was all a giant pain but they did fine, given the circumstances.