I feel that not only should QA staff outnumber developers, but QA staff should have access to development time to design and improve QA tooling.

If you're doing an OS right, the quality is the product. I think MacOS prior to the launch of the iPhone would be the gold standard the kind of product design I'm talking about. At that time they were running circles around Windows XP/7 in terms of new features. They were actually selling the new OSes and folks were happy to pay for each roughly annual upgrade. Often the same hardware got faster with the newer OS.

Lately Microsoft and Apple are racing to the bottom, it seems.