>these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers.

This is correct. Consulting is 100% marketing. It appears the problem is, how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing, and many of these companies have inertia from a bunch of previous projects they can use in their marketing.

I feel like actually good engineers have the least social contacts, and it is these social contacts that provide all of the opportunities to start building a client-base. This seems to be the case with society in general. Everything is decided by social relationships, and the best engineers are the worst at creating these relationships, or are actively excluded from them as some sort of defence mechanism for social people to maintain power. Hence why we end up with a bunch of terrible products and software. It is all bundled up in a cocoon of social contracts.