If you have a dedicated QA team that is staffed by people who don't write software, those people are at best technicians. They are not peers of the engineers, they're a different job function with a much much lower barrier to entry. They're closer to the customer support team than they are to engineering.
That's not to say that they are somehow undeserving of basic respect. They are (as are support personnel), but given the choice between QA and engineering, almost anyone would choose engineering. The reason QAs aren't on engineering teams is that they can't pass the interviews. The inverse is not true.
None of that is to bash QA. But pretending they're peers of engineering and lamenting that they aren't treated as equals is just based on a fantasy.