[popey]

There certainly used to be a strong push to have internal people use the product a lot more during the development cycle. There was also a real desire to make the devel version actually usable. That fell by the wayside, sadly.

Having your developer workstation break while you have a backlog full of stuff to do, would absolutely make you less motivated to run the developer release. Especially if you're not on the desktop team.

[kyrofa]

I suspect it was a lot easier to feel like that was one's duty when the company was smaller and you were closer to every piece of it. It was also probably easier to get issues resolved when you knew exactly who to talk to. Maintaining that culture as you grow is probably quite the challenge!