@Renegade Sewist Oh I hear you and unfortunately familiarity with a designer's style can allow problem spots to be missed or glossed over..as in 'I know what she meant to write'. I've seen this too often in the yarny arena. Others don't want to offend so don't report oopsies, others just make it without looking at it from a newbies point of view, some designers won't make alterations, they just want finished items on display. It can become a minefield..oh and there's always the testers who ghost after receiving the pattern too.
I'm in a yarny test at the moment and the girls have been 'brutal' over fit.. things were far far too loose. With a few ladies speaking up, it made the designer go back over things to try to work out what was going wrong. This was designer overlook of gauge when copy/pasting from another design to speed up the writing process... I might add that her patterns are very good and there was a lot of head scratching going on from all parties trying to work out why this one was a problem. An easy fix on paper, a lot of hours lost for testers but this pattern will get glowing reports when published because it has been properly tested.
The best tests(no matter the discipline) are when a designer takes on a couple of testers from each category, known testers they've worked with before and happy with because they are 'brutal' and would still have a cuppa and chat with, absolute novices and a couple of intermediate.
Just to clarify, when I say brutal I mean it in the nicest way, just that everything, down to spacing between words and missing letters/punctuation erros get reported, so formatting issues as well.