This past September I took my mother to her homeland which she is always homesick for. My mother is 83 and I am 53. My mother was a stewardess on Swissair from the mid 1950s until mid 1960s. We booked our flight on Swiss, the spiritual successor of Swissair, as we always do. I paid $29 per seat extra so that we could sit together with a window. When the plane took off my seat went into full recline position. By itself. The 20- something Italian or Ticinese man behind started pounding on my seat. I informed him that seat was broken, not my fault. I spend next half hour holding seat back up so as to not inconvenience people behind. By fiddling with button I got seat back to finally stay in position. Too late- the youngsters behind felt that I had been messing with them on purpose and proceeded to kick and punch hard my 83 yr old mother's chair for 2 hours. I finally stood up and called cabin crew, explained situation. The Italian woman behind told crew that she would "kill me." Honestly, I did nothing to provoke this. Crew offered to move my mother and me to mid fuselage seats. I said no thanks as I paid for seats. Trouble makers should have been warned or moved. We spent next 5 hours with our seats upright. Flight ruined. I called Swiss customer service and after a month, "Ajai" offered me $100 off next flight due to malfunctioning infotainment system. Did anyone read complaint? Passenger threatened to kill me. Crew was totally ineffective at remedying situation. I wrote back to Ajain and reiterated my experience. He responded, 1 month later, that Swiss would do nothing for us at all. Bye bye Swiss after we were loyal customers for 6 decades. Swissair is gone. Lufthansa's Swiss Airlines is shabby.

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That is an unfortunate incident. And I'd imagine that having your seat in full recline is much worse than I got on a CX flight where it could not recline. Youngsters nowadays are quite rude and totally seem not to understand. I admit I'm a youngster, but seriously, their attitudes baffle me.
Back on track, I think that you can't really do much, other than to not patronize Swiss, as it appears that their customer "service" is ran by baboons, which is sadistic, to say the least.

Realistically, moving you away from the malfunctioning seat and malfunctioning passengers and giving you $100 are about all the airline will do.

The age and ethnicity here are irrelevant.
The passengers may not have understood that your seat was broken, nor why you would you refuse the offer to relocate to a properly functioning seat. It sounds like in the end the passengers behind you have just as much right to be upset with Swiss as you. If there was a broken seat, you move the passenger in the broken seat to an unbroken one.

As for Swiss's customer service, I challenge you to find an airline in the world without a post of someone on Flyertalk saying how horrible their customer service. "Horrible customer service " = "didn't do what I wanted."

For future reference, "questions" about specific airlines belong in the forum for that airline.