From my experience, this is confusing the issue - the OP was talking about using their DDoS filtering service, not their CDN. This is done by Prolexic - who despite being acquired by Akamai, still seems to function fairly independently.
I've no idea what the CDN team are like, but it's not really fair to say don't use product X from company Y, because product Z sucks.
We've tried a number of DDoS filtering services, and Proxleic/Akamai has been the most professional and effective so far. They're also the most expensive, by a fair bit, but you get what you pay for I guess.
Could you define buckets of cash? On the low end, one gets 30TB/month (1gbps uplink, 200mbs guaranteed) included for ~60 Euro a month, or 100TB for ~160 Euro (for a single server, outbound) at Hetzner:
Such a single server, isn't the same as a CDN of course, just curious what you consider "buckets of cash". I see cachefly asks for 400 USD for 2/TB a month, for comparison.
They're the most abhorrent combination of incompetence and arrogance that I've ever met in the tech industry.
They're the Oracle of the network world. Just don't waste your time on them. There's plenty better and cheaper CDNs nowadays.
Leave Akamai to the Governments and MegaCorps, they deserve each other.