Well at the risk of being flippant if you don't know what good quality software looks like, you probably work for, with or on behalf of these vampire-squid-consultancies. Or you have no business having an opinion about it or trying to form one. Really. It's as pointless as forming opinions about who is a good contemporary composer if you've been deaf since birth.
Look at all the successful startups disrupting industry by writing software. Note the total lack of vampire-squid consultancy in their codebase.
Look at the public service orders of magnitude cost blowouts and non-functionality that is the norm. Look at the domination of vampire-squid consultancies right there.
It's really not difficult to see unless you're determined to keep your eyes shut. The vampire-squid consultancies should not exist and are a symptom and proof of the prevalence of misallocation of resource in decisions made by the wholly ignorant.
99% with you, but the vampire-squid consultancies came into being on the backs of market participants trading bank notes for software, and continue to exist on a steady supply of bucks for bugs.
So what did they do right, and what are they continuing to do right other than infecting large organizations with their blood sucking tentacles in a manner which closely resembles a Hokusai woodblock-print and removing some of the favored organs of the management end of the org chart that to be honest, they probably weren’t using anyway?
I get rafted in as a vendor for part of a package that several of them offer to Fortune 500s. They provide negative value - it would be massively easier if I could just hook up directly with the end-customer's IT and do what needed to be done with competent people who know their job and what they want. But I have to play telephone through two or three layers of project managers in Delhi and Bangalore and an ever-shifting array of other people of indeterminate status and role.
They are a symptom of the resource allocation being performed by those who are wholly ignorant. They exploit this. Viciously and mercilessly. They should not exist. They would not exist if the people making the resource allocation decision, ie senior management and boards of directors were competent to make the decisions with tens, hundreds even thousands of millions of dollars at stake. The con is on. It's much easier to con the ignorant and they do. Moreover they actually mercilessly attack, undermine and destabilise anyone working in the public service or fortune 500 co.s who might actually have enough of a clue to get in their way.
It has nothing to do with Hokusai.
Excusing vampire-squid consultancies on the basis that the conditions are ideal for their horror is simply unconscionable.
They are a disgrace to our industry. They desperately, desperately need everyone to believe "We are bad at sofware engineering" to continue their con. But we are NOT. We can do software engineering and have done it well, so many times, so publically with such spectacular success disrupting powerful incumbants from the garage with nothing more than software. We will continue to do so. Who is next? You? Me? Absolutely not anyone hiring a vampire squid. Guaranteed.
Which company is making good Quality software in your view?