In my own experience, certain companies will only rely on commercial software (and would never use open source for instance). Particularly established banking and financial houses, for example. They’d rather extract third party support, by the very letter of the expensive paid support agreements, as they’re better at it and will get blood from a stone at any cost. They’re pretty much all still around too. Money, of course, is no object and they’ll pay for something and they will get it.

(Only the newer ‘fintech’ upstarts go the independent route, we’ll have to see how that turns out. Personally, I don’t trust them with their what has to be corner-cutting low cost hackathons to manage my finances. Let’s not even get into the slow motion crash of cryptocurrency and all of the Eldritch entities that has released upon the world…)

It would be interesting to see if the industry agrees with your statement of ‘modern web sites are developed with in-house developers’. I’ve seen everything from small companies all patching together Wordpress spaghetti abhorrences to the household name bigger ones using code to auto-generate their larger spaghetti dishes (from developers, not designers). Perhaps write something up, get some opinion? It would be genuinely interesting.

I won’t get into QA, as I spent some time as a tester myself, but the general attitude I’ve always seen (especially with modern practices) is to ‘test as you go’ and shun QA completely. Horrible mistake — many companies may a lot for lack of foresight and penny-pinching.

I would disagree with who pays the highest price gets the best systems, I’d go with who paid the highest price is probably dealing with a Windows system that’s 30 years ago or is locked into some contract that delivers horrible code with a gold standard support agreement. YMMV. You don’t always have to pay over the top for quality, I’d say, just know very well who you’re dealing with and what you’re getting yourself into in terms of ongoing support and maintenance.

Geez, sorry for going on a bit, this industry is just weird.