If the game currently crashes every hour on the hour, that is lots of time to show a couple people the game, but I don't think many backers would want to actually play it in that state.
I finished The Witcher in that state (but that was supposedly a release version...) and there are many games that never make it past that stage, so yeah, the occasional memory leak and related crashes wouldn't bother me all that much in an *alpha* version.
Similarly, there could be unfinished cutscenes or quests that would cause problems if you explored in a certain direction or talked to a certain NPC, which would be easily avoidable with someone there to give a warning, but less avoidable for all the people who don't read release notes.
Iirc not the entire game (content-wise) would be available, so assuming they focused their attention foremost on the part they want to show us (likely the bit they've also shown in various videos and to various reporters) this shouldn't be too much of an issue.
More likely the finishing touches are being done, or there is a release candidate going through QA to make sure there are no obvious / serious issues remaining.
Meh, it's an alpha, it's gonna be buggy in various ways. I'd be dissapointed if it weren't (because then they perfectionisted (yes, I just made that word up) too long before releasing an alpha (and it won't really be an alpha but more of a bete imo)
And of course as Stabbey said, even if the alpha itself was ready to go it wouldn't make sense to release it to get feedback if the mechanism for receiving that feedback isn't done.
Now that's a reason I can get behind
Foremost the best way to get good feedback is to have people break your product. Users are incomprehensibly great at finding the weak spots in your software and then pushing them until the thing comes toppling down. (I'm a developer; the amount of "That can't possibly happen!"s I've seen happen...
)
But really, if it doesn't happen this month it doesn't. There won't be tar and pitchforks or anything. I'm pretty sure most of us here are pretty RPG-starved by now and are starting to have the shakes due to withdrawal
