Really? The best people I worked with were never QA.

Moreover, the best QAs would almost always try to be not QA - to shift into a better respected and better paid field.

I wish it werent so (hence my username) but there is a definite class divide between devs and QA and it shows up not just in terms of the pay packets but also who gets the boot in down times and who gets listened to. This definitely affects the quality of people.

I think it's overdue an overhaul much like the sysadmin->devops transition.

We have differing experiences, which shouldn't be surprising. My example explicitly referred to someone who was a good engineer who enjoyed the QA role.

This might have been an Apple/MS thing, but we always had very technical QA people on the dev tools team. For example, the QA lead for the C++ compiler had written their own compiler from scratch and was an amazing contributor.