I think this tradeoff in quality vs quantity has been central to the inability of most Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) formal symbolic methods to 1) scale up beyond toy academic clean-room problems (from the admittedly little I've seen of commercial LS/CS), as well as 2) support the flexibility and imprecision needed to deal with a messy ill-defined very big world with a seemingly unknowable number of unknowns.
It may be that this venerable yin v yang of knowledge modeling will forever bedevil AI. I don't have the sense that any techniques in the past 30 years have really made headway in breaking this log jam. Deep nets have just tilted the playing field in its favor, so long as we're willing to ignore fussy details like dependence, FOL, and causality.