Releasing an official patch takes more work (building an installer vs. uploading a zip file to the forum) and must go through a QA process, have localisation translated, be sent to and uploaded by external distributers (like Steam) etc, all of which takes time and cost money which means you can't afford to do that too often. Beta patches can quickly be thrown up on the forum without any of the requirements above to give us some quick feedback so that we can continue to improve on the patch.
Exactly. Who would create an installer for something they weren't confident in!?
I was always under the impression that Captain Gars had some funny stories to share with us about installers that went no where!