It seems you have fallen for the common confusion between Quality Assurance and Quality Control by equating testers with QA. Big mistake. Quality Control is about making sure that the final product meets its specifications, including reducing the number of bugs. This can be done by rigorous testing at the end and rejecting failures. Quality Assurance is about having a process in place that reduces the probability of not meeting the specifications in the first place. It's far from clear that either your approach before the change or after would actually achieve either of these things.