This might have been an Apple/MS thing, but we always had very technical QA people on the dev tools team. For example, the QA lead for the C++ compiler had written their own compiler from scratch and was an amazing contributor.
This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.
As I said above, everyone has their own experiences but the QA folks I worked with at MS were fantastic.
Not sure if you're aware but Dave Plumber now has a really good YT channel [0] where he talks about MS back in those days. It's a fun walk down memory lane.
But yea, so many companies cheap their QA and then wonders why their QA sucks.
> Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field.
That sort of seems circular. If they're not respected or paid well, of course most of the talented people would not want to remain in QA, and eventually you'd just have mediocre QA. That doesn't really give you any insight into whether high quality QA would be useful though.
(edit: I see now that's basically the point you're trying to make, so I guess we're in agreement)