Mordacious....HOW DARE YOU be happy with Hughesnet!!!
You seem to have a distorted view:
You do not "cap" your service. The "caps" referred are the high limits of your plan: (IE: 20/50 GB)
Related to speed, you do not get 1.5 MEGS, you get 1.5 Mbps .....
Your installer is not a Hughes employee. He is a subcontractor tasked with doing installations and repairs. He has no "inside knowledge" of the state of a Gateway.
As to troubleshooting. There are procedures that need to be followed. You don't start at the "engine" (read as Gateway) and work backwards to the "caboose" (read as the users entire environment including software and hardware) you troubleshoot from the user end forward.
Your installer can't repoint your dish to a different more lightly loaded satellite, he can however improve the aim to your present satellite.
As to someone "changing your gateway", not even God can change your gateway (of which there are 17) because ALL of the users in a given beam have their traffic routed to a given Gateway Facility where the traffic is routed, within that facility, to assigned upload & download server's.
That is what was changed .. moved to uplink/downlink servers that are more lightly tasked (at the moment)
That is an "end result", the entire point of the troubleshooting process. Start at the user end .. progress along testing and verifying performance at each point along the way.
Because a user is in a remote location and the greatest likelihood of an issue being rooted in the users configuration followed by local hardware the user has to be involved in the troubleshooting process.
Have a nice day.