Okay, so they make it rain. You find you really, really like the Sabre and rent it, and then earn a butt-tonne of REC with it. So you keep renting it. And then you just keep renting it. Where is the intensive to pledge for this ship? Where is the intensive to try (test) anything else?
If REC becomes easier to get it'll be harder to rent the ship you like. The Sabre and Super Hornet would end up being on the site every other fortnight, half of the month SH is available, second half of the month Sabre is and it alternates. You get to the end of your 7 day rental token and you are back in your Aurora (Best ship) with a load of other REC'd weapons you got for the Sabre that won't fit it or you HAVE to rent a different ship.
Such is the spirit of testing, we don't want you getting comfy in one ship as that breeds complacency.
As for testing, the playing masses are not in a position to do rigorous testing. Game testing is not play and see if it works, game testing is going along a corridor wall to see if you clip through it, then doing it again crouching, then doing it again laying down. Then doing all that again with a pistol in your hand. Then doing it again with a rifle, then doing all that again with the sniper rifle while looking though the scope, then doing it again with a bandanna on, then doing it again with someone pushing you, then doing it all again with a Big Bennys machine in the way... Game testing is laborious.
We can bug report but if you are in the middle of testing out a glitch in the Security Station that has taken you 20 minutes to set up, and some PvP player comes along and head-shots you, time and effort is wasted.
CIG should have their own Testers to in-house the stuff they don't want us to see yet, like s42. The Evocati do the main player side testing in the PTU which is updated every day and has to be downloaded every day to make sure anything that is fixed has not broken anything else. The patches we get 2.6.1 being the current one are pretty locked down and if they fix an issue with the HUD in the PTU they can then release a new PTU for everyone to test if that causes problems with the Olisar ship request Screens or Mobiglas, which would then need fixing and checking to see if they broke anything else further on.
Fun times, eh?