Telemark, thanks for your points.
I will point out that standalone tools do exist, in both large shops and small. Red Gate database diff tool is standalone and I don’t know what it would mean for it to be “integrated” into anything. It certainly is not cheap, and I don’t know how they go about selling it.
Naturally, databases are a special case in more ways than one. For the build integrating in .net environment (unlike java) should not be a chore. I am not sure what you mean by integration with bug tracking - isn’t bug tracking done manually through a web interface?
QA is a separate topic. For now my thoughts seem to roughly divvy up into “new and improved Red Gate” and “what might become better QA, if I learn more of QA state of the art”. E.g. for QA I believe that state of the art tools for web apps are vastly superior to state of the art tools for desktop apps (well, not surprisingly, given the underlying mechanics). There are ways to design desktop guis to be more testable and there are some internal Microsoft attempts to make an instrumentable gui using a specialized widget framework, but I never heard of this getting lots of traction. So maybe a tool that would instrument .net desktop guis “as is” might make sense.
“False positives” and “training” sound like FUD for a sufficiently user friendly app. I mean we are not talking about Coverity reloaded in terms of the power and esotericism of models involved.
Bugs have been found since the beginning of programming, since before unit tests were invented. They are still found now in those shops where, as per engineer comp geek, unit testing is minimal or non-existent. Presumably “bandaids” would help finding them faster and easier.
All that being said, my position here should not be taken as a zealous sermon, more of a meditation on / desire to learn more of unfamiliar topics. I believe in the possibility of clever solutions to complex problems, including both low hanging fruit type of situations (like Red Gate) and “years of research needed for breakthrough” situations. And then there are various intermediate situations, e.g. long build times in dot net compiler for less-than-optimally structured codebases.
I am also aware that this is not Bell Labs circa 1980, and where I am personally is not even one of the pale modern imitations of that. But looking at the world around me, seeking to understand it and exploring solutions to apparent problems is still interesting in and of itself.