Successful outsourcing stories are few and far between; stories of failures are a dime a dozen. The reason is exactly as you say: companies are not judged on the quality they deliver.

In fact, the same problem has plagued the IT industry since forever. Almost no company successfully competes on quality, because the customer chooses the cheapest offer in the majority of cases.

And here is the crux: define the quality of a delivered software project and put a number on how much higher quality would have saved the customer. Nigh impossible.

The only solution seems to be going into a specialty niche where high quality is required, so any incumbent competitor will fail, unless they deserve to win, because they deliver your level of quality.