That's like the Sony Vegas Pro Beta. It was a closed invite only program of only about ~50 participants but our reports all seemed to be like sending them into a Black Hole. Then the next release would come out and we would see the flaw corrected, in the end our last version would be pushed to us with the claim this was the final and there would still be so many problems, but a month later the release would come out and all would be fixed. Your suspicion is probably right, but I suspect the "others" as you claim are probably the inner circles of testers, the people who get invited to work the trade show booths and teach the classes at Sony University. I'm not complaining as these guys are some of the top people in the world, many work for a division of Sony like Sony Pictures. I'm sure it's the same with Apple.