Background
I have been working with Salesforce Support for several weeks now trying to get them to escalate an internal server error with GACK 2134764861-123797 (1611479512) (1611479512). After a long period of waiting I was told that in order to escalate quickly they needed to reproduce the issue in a controlled way. This was again taking them a considerable amount of time so I created a reduced test case myself (https://github.com/dsharrison/spring-17-ant-error-reproduction) that concisely reproduces the issue with a very small amount of code. I was told that this wasn't a valid reproduction because it caused a different GACK (1291518605-518052 (1659192199) (1659192199)) despite reproducing the exact same user experience.
My Question
What makes up a GACK? Is there any information that I can take from their structure that can give me clues on which errors are related without access to the full back-end tools that Salesforce Support uses? It is not infrequent that without premier support it takes me upwards of two weeks to escalate platform bugs and I am hoping that I can somehow use the information from the GACK to reduce this time.