Far too many coders have an an adversarial relationship with QA departments. I get it, I used to be the same way - it feels lousy to be called on your faults. But in this moogle's opinion, there's little that's more important than having a robust and capable QA team.
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I hear you! The best two QA teams I've ever seen were at King, and here at Arrowhead. Reason being that at both companies, we have to do the game equivalent of eating our own dog food. At King, the entire team would run through test cases prior to a release.
Meanwhile at AH, the QA lead randomly selects a handful of team members to playtest for an hour. Statistically you're never more than two weeks from getting tapped for a play session.