KDE 4, distributors, and bleeding-edge software

Won't the number of useful testers, only needs to go up with the logarithm, not linearly? You'll hit diminishing returns scaling teams otherwise, with the quality of error reporting getting worse and worse.

The complaint about lack of Alpha & Beta test, is something I've seen in relation to distro's to. The trouble is installing a recent 'real' release, finding it's broken, then waiting 2 months for updates, doesn't make you enthusiastic to try Alpha.