We used to get valuable user feedback on the sly, as management forbade us from contacting them.
But salespeople knew their incomes depended on user satisfaction, and beating out the software competition. So they gave some of the smarter users our phone numbers, and slipped beta versions of our work to the users who knew what they would be looking for in it, people who could really beat on it and find the breaks, just like our QA people were trying all day to do. (This was early WP and database work.)
Any bug we could locate before release, from whatever source, was a plus to us. These people were probably given a deadline by management, with insufficient or misallocated man-hours to meet it. And the result is...