I have to agree here with DosDawg, it really makes no sense to give the alpha or early beta to users who havent a clue what they are doing. How are inexperienced users supposed to know the difference between say, server set up problems which makes things not work properly,and bugs in the programme itself. It will just slow things up in the testing phase. This needs giving to experienced Beta testers only, thats what they are good at,so it should be used to full advantage rather than get bogged down see more with problems that users think are bugs but are really related to set up, servers and so on.
Ive seen the benefit of this already in related posts, where some users cant even get it to work and think its rubbish, but other more experienced users have a showable URL with a nice looking D7 site at the end of it. So it does really make more sense to give it to people who really know what they are doing in the interest of speed and effectiveness of testing to the final results of something we can all make use of.

Regards

tyke