request for evidence

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For $500 you're getting some administrative assistant to prepare your paperwork, and not much else. A decent lawyer starts at around $150 per hour. What you got is the legal industry equivalent of a fast-food drive-through immigration document prep service.

I completely understand not having much free time to work on this stuff. I also considered hiring an attorney to save me from having to spend a lot of time on this. However, having had some prior experience in legal matters that required the assistance of an attorney, I know there is a huge difference between the quality of service you get when you hire an attorney for personal service and pay them by the hour versus paying one low fixed price for the service. With a paper mill legal service, the potential for losing your legal battle is dramatically increased. There's also a chance they'll leave a mess for your next attorney (whom you'll probably have to pay by the hour). If the paper mill service fails, then you won't completely understand why because you won't have spent the time to do your own research.

In the end, I decided it was better to spend a few months researching what to do, even though I could only spare an hour or two each day, and then do it myself. I consulted with a lawyer to double check my work.

To look at this from a different perspective, the time you saved by hiring the attorney for document prep may have been lost because you got an RFE. If you ultimately end up getting denied because there are other mistakes in your documents, then that $500 isn't going to look like such a good deal anymore.

$500 isn't going to get much of ANY professional's time, particularly if it's supposed to include filing AOS as well. This is a process that needs pro-active real time management, not just document preparation and submission. In any event, you'll have to wait for the actual RFE and then respond accordingly. It's quite possible the delay will be only a couple weeks.