Reaching Out - Dell Docking Station K10A Warranty

I purchased three Dell Docking Stations for corresponding Dell Venue Pro 11 tablets. They have been subpar, and have had several issues, but I managed to find a narrow use case that worked on a day to day basis for these devices, so that they could work for our normal usage (Update to latest firmware, make sure auto display sleep and tablet sleep were turned off, because otherwise they would never turn back on, when re-docking would still have issues, so would have to unplug,re-plug the dock back in and turn off the monitors and back on in a certain order, etc) Several other issues like this have come up, and I see many posts on this forum and I am not alone in these issues.

However, recently, I ran into issues that could not be fixed no matter what I do. One of the docks does not display any external video at all, and the USB ports also do not now work (Charging of the tablet seems to work though, but I'm not positive). The 2nd dock will no longer output to display port correctly (it keeps blinking on and off, after previously working for months, not sure what happened there. I updated the firmware to no avail)

Because I have several docks, tablet and monitor combinations, and can verify with multiple devices that these docks themselves do no work, I am looking for a warranty replacement. However Dell's support has been a nightmare.

First, it took nearly 2 hours to get to someone that I could actually talk to about it (All of the support options look for a service code - the docks do not have a service code. I have the option to not provide a service code, but then got kicked around to every single department who said they don't handle docking stations, try this next one - this was repeated several times). Eventually, I entered my tablet service code (which is out of warranty), just to get to someone to whom I could explain the dock problems to.

Finally, at that point, I was starting to initiate the claim, however, since I didn't order the product from Dell, they start the warranty from the date of manufacture, and have stated that it is out of warranty. (Date of purchase was Jan 20th 2015 from Amazon, these should both still be covered under warranty, but they said the date of manufacture according to the serial number is 18 months ago)

I re-iterated several times to the CS rep that this does not make sense. So if you buy a Dell product not from Dell directly, effectively, it's warranty cannot be honored? How is this possible? I asked to speak to a supervisor, and have been on hold for a half an hour now.

I really hate these types of posts and I'm sorry to be making one myself, but this experience has been extremely frustrating. Can someone please help to escalate this ticket to the appropriate locations, or point me in the right direction in getting this resolved?