My wife has a freelance QA consultancy, and while I understand that there is often the sense that QA is a 'nag', I can honestly say that whenever she is involved in my work, the quality of my output is much better, and takes less time to get it there.

A good QA analyst / team does much more than point at a problem and say 'there it is'. A good QA analyst can determine why you made an error, and can anticipate other errors you might have made in the same way. A good QA analyst will learn your formulae, learn your equations, understand your workflow and try to find root cause, even if they're not developers.

Having a good QA person with a trained eye for knowing what I'm likely to have overlooked is also FAR more cost effective than your high-paid developers doing the same task. If they know that 'heads will roll' when they get errors, I'm also betting that makes your releases even slower.

Off-topic completely, but I generally prefer non-developer QA analysts, as they generally prove themselves to 'think too much like me' to be effective.