Having done a period of customer service type jobs myself:

it's about 1 in 1000 people that are grateful for the service they receive. The rest of them expect the service because they bought something from Corporation X, and expect Corporation X to fix it. In my experience, when people have to deal with real individuals when obtaining goods and services, they are much more grateful. When a person knows that the good or service comes from person A, who is paying the bills for the building, and working hard to establish clients, that is when genuine customer/seller relationships occur.

It goes without saying, small business relationships are much more friendly. Nobody consuming a product cares about the corporation it comes from, only that it works 100% of the time. It's no surprise that support staff behind a phone or counter of corporation X are treated like slime, no matter how nice they try to be. Eventually, having to deal with that mentality day in and day out will wear a person down.

On original topic...
SE has designed a system to help keep your account secure, due to this there is a limitation of fasle positives. They've determined the false positive ratio is outweighed by their desire to keep your account from being hacked. If you're locked out, reset and move forward. A small annoyance to maintain account security. I had to do it quite a bit during Beta, as a few close friends were sharing an account to get a feel for this game.

Alternately, as others have said, pick up a security token. You're willing to shell $50/m to SE for 5 accounts, but not pick up a token to make the lockouts a non-issue? That seems a little confusing.