Hard to disagree with you overall here, Bill --- I was a software developer myself at one point in my evil past, and have shipped a few products. And participated in the ship/no-ship triage process with dev, QA, marketing, etc each having their own dynamics, and I certainly agree that there are no bug-free products out there that are much more complicated than "hello world".

IMO, the NG products suck eggs even in that context. What's particularly bad is when a shipped and still-selling product has fundamental flaws, yet the company says they won't fix them. If your SD experience has put you in the sort of triage meetings where you decide which bugs are show stoppers and which ones can be deferred to a .x release or just never fixed, I would hope you would agree that a bug such as "UTM coordinate algorithm incorrect, wrong values displayed" would be in the "must-fix" category, rather than "who cares, we're done with that product and on to others now". In general, I think a crashing bug is preferable to one that silently gives incorrect results.

The whole idea of calling the sub-group "QA" rather than "testing" is to have some explicit process, some control and decision making about the quality level of the products. My experience with NG is that when you get an update to their software, you expect some bugs might be fixed, and some new (significant) ones will be almost certainly be added, it's a crap shoot.

I can't imagine wanting to be a beta tester for such an organization. I nevertheless hope that you have a positive experience !