[deleted] Since I'm apparently doing the opposite of what would get me useful support(?), what should I be doing, short of returning my phone?
Personally I think you have three possible moves:
- Return the phone. As I suggested earlier, if you have found reports online of people purchasing unlocked phones from Google and not being able to unlock them, maybe bring some of those reports and try to talk them into treating the phone as broken instead of charging you a restocking fee.
- Wait until the issue filed by from-Google-Store purchasers makes its way through the system (which could take weeks or months -- who knows?) and hope that Google can either remotely enable OEM unlocking for the device you have, or will set up a mechanism for returning non-unlockable devices.
- Try to sell the device second-hand as a Fi-specific device.
If the device is genuinely not OEM-unlockable, then installing GrapheneOS on it is genuinely not possible, and it seems unlikely that the GrapheneOS project can fix that (at least, I can't imagine how). Since Best Buy presumably won't take the device back forever, it may be infeasible to wait for Google to figure out what they will do.
I suspect what @GrapheneOS meant by "A Pixel from the Google Store is guaranteed to be able to be unlocked" is that if the device sent by the Google Store is not unlockable then it is guaranteed that they will resolve the issue. This is consistent with the report from jahim663 that Google's front-line support is escalating the issue.
Personally I am fairly motivated to buy my next Pixel from the Google Store, because that seems to me to be the "most guaranteed" way to get an unlockable device. Part of my consideration is that when I failed to unlock my first 6a, bought from Amazon, I tried Amazon tech support and it wasn't clear to me the person I was connected to understood what OEM unlocking is.