My concern is this: How long will it take players of the less-common
classes (in particular Bards and Rogues) get to higher levels to test the
songs/skills etc that only come at the high-level.

I heard (here?) that Verant's in-house testing group is four. We know
their ability to test Bard songs is poor to non-existent (levitate change
for example). So basically - the one stopgap hope we have for changes that
affect songs is gone until the few people that play bards (or fill in other
class) on the test server enough to get to level X...

This shows very poor foresight.

As far as conjecture - I wonder if Verant is planning on making a major
change (database?) that is dramatically changing some sort of data structure
and wants to put the change into the test server before they write the
conversion program. If so - doesn't give me much confidence on the data
(i.e. high-level chars) they are testing that conversion with...

Slyde