Elizabeth also hypothesizes that some ‘rigorous end to end testing’ be have been of benefit, something that I agree with too.

I think its hard enough to convince small companies & startups of the importance of some good pre-release testing without having ‘testers’ advocating this approach even if they are in the business of crowd-sourcing.

In this particular case, we know that 50 Beta Testers, plus 200 Unit Tests was insufficient. The results tell us so.

Now we don’t know if more Beta Testers would be better.
And we don’t know if more Unit Tests would be better.

Elizabeth hypothesizes that testing by people with more testing skills would have been better (I agree).

uTest doesn’t really say. But of course they are in the business of selling crowdsourced testing, so it’s not hard to guess what they might suggest. (To me, their testing model is far more like “more Beta testers” than “more testing skills”. )