My positive experiences with QA were always when the QA team was strictly separated from the production team.

Ideally, no friendship whatsoever.

Doing QA is hard. Bouncing issues & QA reports between teams is hard. Bouncing issues between people that know each others too well or have a common manager leads to all sorts of issues.

In this specific instance, it could be as simple as the manager trying to balance things between teams and thus letting things slip past the due date or with sub-par quality.

My worst experience was when a married couple worked together on a project I was involved with: one on the sw team and the other in QA. Working together is hard, working on "antagonistic" teams is hell