Having worked with both QA and Dev resources on Software projects I always bet on the Devs to win. All Devs I've worked with find undocumented features in the code.
QA is another story, a normal QA person finds bugs, an exceptional QA Person finds Workarounds for the bugs, and even finds other bugs based on the code correction.
Some *** Developers hated me because I could usually crash any program by thinking like a normal user and doing the unexpected.
Much of the post release time has been spent dealing with APIs in various driver versions that just don't work. Some crash. Some don't deallocate memory. It's been painful. We do some different things with our visuals that are biting us in the rear.
I wish I could say "If only we'd waited until February" but no. No way. Game features might have been more polished but the stability wouldn't have changed much which is really a sad state of affairs. That is what really causes despair. That we may be reaching the end of the line where new 3D engines can be created without spending millions on them and have them have a chance of working reasonably on launch.
The Pear engine worked and evolved over 7 years. Kumquat should hopefully go for another 7 years. After that, I suspect we'll all be licensing stuff or the gaming platform on the PC will have changed dramatically. I remember on the eve of launch my biggest concern being diplomatic AI. Not stability.
But we're going to focus on Elemental for as long as it takes. As a privately owned company, I can have us work on something purely on principle rather than the profit motive. Elemental needs to be awesome.
