Their own IT systems are baling-wire-and-spit Rube Goldberg machines that glue together the wheezing computers of all the companies they've bought over the last 25 years. Retrieving your paperwork is a nontrivial task, and the lender doesn't have any reason to perform it.
Debt collectors are bottom feeders. They are buying delinquent debts at 5 cents on the dollar and hoping to recover 8 percent of them; at 7 percent, they're losing money.
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They aren't "large, nationally scaled, hypercompetent operators" - they're shoestring operations that can *only* be viable if they hire unskilled workers and fail to train them.
They are subject to automatic damages for illegal behavior, but they still break the law *all the time*. As McKenzie writes, a debt collector will "commit three federal torts in a few minutes of talking to a debtor then follow up with a confirmation of the same in writing."
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