You're not expecting too much at all. This should have been addressed with the first agent you spoke to, full stop. Disregard the noise about seat maps and availability. It sounds like the NSat service desk agent told you there were two seats available. I'm going to assume that meant to sell. So the first agent you spoke with should have seen the delay (and been able to tell you why - don't care if they're new or not, that's basic stuff, not some 400 level course), looked at options, seen two seats to sell on flight 26 and re-booked you on it. Alaska wants the airport experience to be easy, and when flights are OT, it usually is. As soon as things go sideways, well, here we are (wouldn't it be nice if you could have just taken care of this on the app since the delay resulted in an illegal connection??). Others' experiences aside, I would not consider your experience to be unique, unfortunately.