Philosophical question:

Is it really a bad "beta", or has your preconceived notion on what a "beta" should be been radically altered by the sheer number of startups that throw the word around now?

Gmail was in "beta" for about a million years, and was incredibly stable for most of that. I think it has become the allegorical metric these days. But I remember back in the late 90's and early 2000's when making the choice to use beta software was a decision not to be taken lightly because you probably would find tons of very easily reproducible, obvious, critical bugs.

Don't forget that before "beta" was widely used as an adjective, it was a noun and it was immediately followed by the word "test".