Thus, for one recent project, I could have chosen from a dozen C++ programmers, all highly rated, charging around $10/hour, but I went straight for the guy charging $60/hour. He did the job perfectly in 7 hours. My hunch, based on past experience, is the alternative would have been days and days of sorting through disappointing results from 3 or 4 different $10/hour jokers before finally giving up.
I would be very interested in a platform that somehow performed real quality control and only accepted people charging a minimum of $50/hour, so that I was virtually guaranteed to only deal with competent professionals who would reliably deliver.
For my purposes, I like the elance/Freelancer model, where I can post a job and quickly hire someone to do 2 hours or 20 hours of specific work. I've just been very disappointed with the quality of work I've gotten every single time I've used these services (with one exception, noted above).
Gun helps you find somebody that fits your requirements, which I think is a step up from elance and the like. They even kick freelancers out of the system if they scam customers or produce poor quality work.
I'm not surprised you're disappointed with the quality of work from elance and similar. Anyone and their dog can offer services through that platform, and the reality is that the people doing the hiring often don't know what they actually want and they don't know how to evaluate the quality of what they're given (on a technical level), so it's pretty easy for a bad developer to get a 5 star rating.
we're not perfect by any means, but i'm happy to see there's love for what we're about!