Getting the business level support is absolutely necessary if you don't have someone with AWS experience and are doing anything substantially complicated. The free-ish support is, on the whole, pretty abysmal. The availability of solution architect time is not always useful. You ask 3 people and get 3 different answers. I've given some thought to doing consulting around this for equity but haven't figured what that would have to look like. There's a lot of wrong turns one can go down pretty easily. Bottomline, Activate is helpful but not sufficient.