Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. More than likely the board was laminated using epoxy resin, hotcoated using epoxy resin, then gloss coated using polyester resin. There are a couple ways to make polyester stick to epoxy, but typically polyester will not chemically bond to epoxy. The epoxy below must be rough sanded to give the surface a “tooth” and sometimes a chemical is applied to promote adhesion mechanically and sort of chemically.
Even when the polyester/epoxy hybrid is done perfectly, the glass job is still subject to having the outer polyester come off in sheets if hit hard enough.
So my bet is the first responder was thinking you wanted a patch work for 50 bucks, the second was to glass the entire bottom for 200 and the last response was to wisely not open this can of worms.
The reason they are avoiding putting more glass on the board is that they would have to completely remove the polyester resin, which would most likely damage the layer of glass below it just enough to make it brittle. The new layer of epoxy lamination would then bond to the original epoxy lamination, then they would probably put a new polyester resin gloss coat, if they are set in their ways to attain their look or finish.
For them to do all that, it would actually (from their point of view,) be more effort than to glass a new board entirely. Re-glassing requires workers to get pulled off line, to figure, scratch their heads, and possibly wreck the board even worse…
That’s a bummer to say, but again, I am guessing and assuming quite a few things…
…from a board producer’s perspective, I would say the board is not defective in the strict sense, that it took some doing outside the norm to produce the problem. Your best protection is to not purchase a board built in this manner ever again. Recourse is hard to prove, since the basis was the result of a collision and typically a succinct warranty is not offered with surfboards.
A picture would really help, since this could be a molded board, or a vacuum bagged board with vinylester finish coat or some other concoction…
George