Wow. Having worked as a dev, and as a QA for 17 years, I've never experienced a relationship between dev and QA as you describe above.

Current role is about shifting quality to the left, helping build in quality into the process, and being less a "tester at the end" to which you throw something over the wall (I've not had that in probably 14 years), and someone who helps Quality Assure/Assist.

Have a look at the World Quality report this year. Spending on QA helps a lot in reducing bugs further down the line. There are always exceptions I guess, and looks like you were in that.