I'm seeing it kinda like in DA2 where Hawke's mansion had storage container stuff inside of it that would not have been in his house in the ghetto w/brother so you needed to advance to that part in order to use it.
Beta testers may be asked to start new games, but I'm sure we will have already been to Skyhold a few times over and, of course beta testers see things we, nor anyone outside of the devs have seen before. That's the idea, we TEST new stuff to make sure it works as the devs intended. And yes a good beta will try to make things happen that shouldn't happen, because when it's released, there are players that delight in looking for the tiniest glitch, bug or exploit, trying to walk through walls and so on.
Having tested a few games, I've seen what happens when not one tester or the devs think of something that no one in their right mind would do, then the material is released and, sure enough 120 players all thought of something not one of us had thought to do and, Boom, stuff we spend 3 months working on blew up in our faces and we all got a rash and a half off the forms in a matter of a few hours. Had to pull the content and rework it for another two weeks before we could try going live with it again. Good times, gray hair and a lot of us claiming we got our heads shaved (we probably pulled our hair out over the mess, but shhh, we aren't telling LOL.)
The good thing is, it taught us all to be very diligent about thinking of things no sane person SHOULD think to try in a game and, trying to do just that.