This thread has been beating around the bush and avoiding even an attempt to reach agreement. People need to first agree on the purpose of this testing and the definition of the resources. Even the original poster seems to have lost track of his original purpose for posting.
To try to put things in their perspective, I think the following terms need definition, both to what they are and their purpose.
Test Release - is it merely a convenient snapshot for installation but serving no useful purpose after that (other than PR)? This is what I would gather from those that advocate that testers stay in sync with Rawhide.
Rawhide - is it the staging ground for release candidates or is it a communication point between a developer and those that are in contact with him? If it is the latter, then there needs to be another repository that indicates that a package is ready for global testing. If it is the former, than I wonder why an intermediate stage exists in the Core 1 tree.
I think that Robert Day's initial point is correct. If there is no stable baseline then testers are constantly finding superficial bugs; deep bugs that take hours of testing will never get reached. Alan Cox is also right when he states that a tester should check against the current state of rawhide before he reports a bug.
I think that a lot of the confusion comes form a lack of a public test plan and the lack of guidelines for testers. Also, for some reason, the difference between internal testing (which in the framework of open source I would consider them to be dedicated testers) and beta testers (those trying to use the features in a real environment) has been totally blurred. Most of the arguments against Robert Day were from the perspective of internal testers. They are right for their function. But most of them didn't need Test 1 except to test Anaconda; they were in sync with rawhide anyway. For beta testers, a stable platform is needed. If they are not at least pretending to do useful work then real life considerations will never be actualized.
In summary, I also advocate an intermediate repository whose sole purpose is to keep the baseline usable. If Redhat is unwilling to do this until development branches to Core 3, then I must assume that Redhat regards final release of Fedora as the real beta.