Quality isn't the end-all be-all. Engineering is about understanding tradeoffs so that you can actually have a profitable business. It has always been tightly coupled with business. You can't build a bridge if no one wants the expense. Government is OK to regulate outcomes (like bridge can't fall down) but it's not OK for it to start mandating that every bridge must be a suspended bridge.

This is the first misunderstanding of people not involved with QA in any way. (IS9000 series).

In this sense, quality doesn't mean "goodness", rather it implies predictability and repeatability. eg Are you doing what you said you would do to make something of "goodness" you defined?

Under the ISO standards it is entirely suitable to have a quality assurance system in your company that says, "we will make minimum effort to make to minimum quality, to the measurable metric of x failures per y products and intended product life span of z days".

The colloquial use and technical use of the word quality are quite different.