Sounds like unnecessary nickle-and-diming. In my experience, good devs don't cost astronomically more than their mediocre counterparts.

While it's true that you don't need to re-implement MongoDB in Clojure to create a successful product, it's not like product quality doesn't matter. Unreliable performance could certainly cost you clients - especially in the enterprise world. Why risk it just to save a few $k?

Name a successful product made by bad developers.

I have a relatively who consults for a big publisher on these offshored educational software products. None of them sell.

> Name a successful product made by bad developers.

Wordpress and nearly every PHP app you can find.

Twitter went down all the time and yet stomped all over its competitors, all of whom had far better uptime. Digg was outsourced for rock bottom prices. Facebook and WordPress are mountains of PHP code.

The reason those educational software products aren't selling has nothing to do with the fact that they were offshored and everything to do with poor market fit or marketing, I guarantee you.