So what is the motivation for employing good developers then? If you make more money by taking longer then the sensible thing to do would be to hire less skilled people who talked a good game but were poor at actually doing stuff.
Also, are companies like Accenture chosen by their clients for the incredible quality of their work? I'm also from Italy, so i could have observed something peculiar to this market, but the clients of those big consulting corps (usually from the financial sector or similar) just pick one of the biggest players as a "safe" bet, technical considerations are not part of the decision.
Which big player do they choose and why? I remember a discussion here on HN about "golf course software", that could be the methodology.
The developers were good or bad in about the same percentages as other companies, but the management structure was designed to suck money out of the client. Work product was secondary (or, whatever) and it showed.