The other market is generally focused on brand protection and domain portfolios, through they tend to be open to private customers as long they are willing to pay the general much higher price. The margin here means that they want to keep their customers, and good support and proactive relation is an effective way to engaged with customers rather than being a pure cost center.
My general recommendation is to use the cheapest one when holding domain names for future projects, and use the second one for anything which would cost you a lot of money and time if things goes south or the registrar do something stupid like in this case.
(disclaimer/context, I work at a small local registrar and I regular hear about this kind of events)