Not my perception at all. There was a release candidate and it was called gamma.
One of the most important parts of the beta test was to get the network code scaled up and working outside of a stable fast internal network. You wouldn't want to have found some of the early beta network bugs on launch day. There are still some bugs remaining - there are plenty of edge cases and a complicated hardware and software chain - but the launch of the game was the smoothest I have ever seen for a large multi-player game (Diablo III is the usual reference point for this). So I'd say that the broad eco system test bed did its job well and wasn't squandered.
For any software system that is released to production there will be known and unknown bugs. Only the ones that break the game for everyone or an unacceptably large number of players are of the Must Fix kind for a target launch day. The closer that day gets then there is a strong element of risk management and workaround rather than break something else. Grumpy cat got that right (e.g. NPC trading not quite working properly in the background simulation - missions still work and combat is still there so the players can workaround it until the high risk fix is delivered).
Yes, the initial launch on Dec 16 went pretty darned well for most people. What I was talking about was the 1.1 beta. The biggest bug in that being the collision damage that cost a lot of people some very expensive ships. That is a mess they are still trying to sort out. That was noticed and well documented and discussed very early on in the 1.1 beta. We never saw a release candidate for 1.1 beta to verify that had been fixed.
Then there were the issues with the changes made to the galaxy seeding...missions, cartography, likely the bounty issue. Those changes were made and not tested by the open 1.1 beta because they were never available fr s to test, and that's fine, but we're in a production environment now, not a test environment, so introducing major chages like that has to be done with more dilligence.