An optimist would think that a bug reported during testing will still get to the list of things to be fixed sooner than if it was discovered when it goes live.

Yes, because of deadlines the fix won’t get into the live game upon release, which is suboptimal. But at least Funcom knows about the issue before it gets live. and as we know, knowing is half the battle. The other half is fixing the bug, which… may take more time than we’d like.