In either case I'm a customer and will likely never be told what went wrong. I'm OK with that so long as it doesn't happen again!
Does being told what happened somehow prevent it from happening it again?
Nope. But if this same issue crops up again we'll have to "work the system" harder and demand calls with knowledgeable people; not an easy task for a customer my size (I'm not Starbucks with thousands of sites). A single outage can be understood, seeing repeated issues means I want to know what's going wrong. If the issue is something simply mitigated and the service provider hasn't taken steps, I need to start looking for a different service provider. Everything has a little downtime every now and again and I can live with it on lower speed circuits.
What is the utilitarian value in an RFO?
To determine whether its an honest mistake or a more systemic issue that should push me toward another option.