Gah, of course checking the commit log would have helped identify what was going on. I don't know why I didn't think to look there.
And of course I understand it's a beta and "take responsibility for myself", I state as much in my original post. I was just asking if there was a critical reason that it was pulled. Even after looking at the timeline and svn I'm not sure why it was pulled. I see that there a few actions on the BETA3 tag related to "too many fatal flaws", but that doesn't indicate what those flaws were.
Further, I can understand pulling a flawed beta, but putting it back up under the same tag and different hash seems broken to me. I've worked with a few projects that have no other way to check for a new release than by looking at the posted files. Changing the release like this is a stealth update and breaks consistency.
If I run into one of those fatal flaws and report it, it can be confusing to me and even the devs if the answer is that my checksummed beta isn't the same as your checksummed beta.
Now, this is a beta and there wasn't an announcement, so presumably it'd be a different procedure after the announcement or with the RELEASE.
And again, I'm not trying to argue that beta software is the same as release. I was just confused as to why the beta was pulled and the above goes in to explaining where that confusion came from on my part.
So, it'd still be helpful if someone could point out what those "fatal flaws" were/are, but yes, I understand it's a beta.