i agree with the spirit of this post but I think you're leaving out an important part. It seems from the other comments that the experiment described never really happened. I think if it were tried it wouldn't really work out as described. I know if i had been in that class and been in the quantity group, I would have made some really crappy, really thick pots and been done as quickly as possible in order to goof off for the maximum amount of time. If I had been in the quality group I wouldn't have theorized about it, I just would have iterated on a lump of clay. Making a pot and then not firing it or anything, just mashing it back into a lump and starting over until I got to a really good one. I think I would have learned a lot more about pot making in the quality group.

What I have read and also experienced is that producing quantity is necessary but not sufficient for producing quality. If you want to get really good at something, rather than just getting somewhat good and then plateauing, you have to not only do it a lot, but you have to care deeply about how good you are doing, identify your weaknesses and work specifically to improve those. The problem with your story is that the quantity kids have no incentive to produce quality, so they probably just won't.

For example, I'm a self-taught programmer. So, in the beginning I wrote some truly atrocious code. I got good at coding when my livelihood depended upon producing and maintaining a large complicated system. The fact that I have to maintain and improve upon this codebase in the future made me a lot better because it made me suffer for my sins, and really care about not repeating them. And obviously having my income depend on it made me care about bugs and performance and stuff a lot more. If I had just been tasked with writing a lot of code, and was paid based on line count or something, I bet I would have written a lot of code and it would have all sucked.