I am having a bit of a deja vu here 
since I tried to build a workflow comparing several multiclass models with seemingly similar data before and also discussed about the structure and quality of the data:
My impression then was that it had more to do with the task and also the target. I suggested if maybe formulating it as a regression task might help but we never managed to finish that conversation. I wonder if given more data an SVM might perform better with a regression task.
A support vector classifier came out on top the last time around although the model overall was not very good.
Other relevant links might be this.