These days, I see this as a subsidy for us older folks who wait a few years to buy a game. The clueless pre-order folks are funding my gaming experience!

Eh, its just the agile development process coming to gaming. Deliver the minimum viable product, work out which parts of the game people care about most, and perfect those bits. Rather than trying to guess what the market wants and spending the entire budget before the game actually gets real usage. If you just wait 6 months after release you end up with a better product than if the game just came out 6 months later.

There's definitely a balance. Yes, they needed to test their games a lot more, but no amount of testing will equal millions of people trying all sorts of weird things you would've never thought about. That being said, games have been also getting a lot more complex in multiple ways. Lastly, PC games also have to deal with an exponential number of hardware variations that is very hard to test exhaustively in house.