If Owlcat lowered the price from $114 then maybe they could have had more beta testers for their early access.
You make a good point but I don't think its something that could be solved by having more people involved with the beta. The bugs I've run into have all stemmed from the same point -- going backwards when the game expected me to go forward. I would enter an area, get damaged, got back to safe place to sleep and return. Game freaks out. And these bug weren't uncovered because the EA testers are more skilled than I and don't feel the need to resort to such "casual" tactics.
Professional bug testers deliberately try to break the game by doing things like this. It's a rare EA tester who will play thinking "I'm just going to see if I can screw up this game"
Again, WotR doesn't cost anywhere near $114, so yet another exaggeration (not you @KillerRabbit).
As for testing, I've long been anti-EA on principle, but now I am rethinking EA. I think EA is still just wrong for a big, well-established studio with a long record of making video games. Those studios should be going straight to a proper launch of their games. But for a small indie studio just beginning to get into the industry, EA is probably a very good way to go, way better than using public betas (which is not the same as internal pro beta testers). I think in the case of WotR, this was Owlcat's single biggest mistake. Instead of using public betas, they should have gone with a combination of some professional beta testing and EA.