Hi Cmdr G,
I sympathise with you buddy honestly. An honest answer to your question, I think they did know, however it is a bit of a 'feeling' as I don't understand FDevs processes.
An example would be update 7. It doesn't make any sense to me at least that they would release it as they did unless when the patch was uploaded from a test server into the main game the code unexplainably scrambled other code hence the numerous 'new' bugs.
We certainly know from feedback from the month long 'beta' that some of that feedback certainly wasn't used constructively.
I guess the point I was trying to make was we are where we are. Most of the community appears to be here in the forums for the social side of it. It's certainly better to try and take the whole situation less seriously if you can as there isn't much more any of us can do other than trying to provide 'constructive' feedback to FDev when they ask for it throughout as they try to fix the game.
Whether we should be having to of course is another matter entirely.