Your point seems to be:
"The problem is that the focus on design means that developers spend too much effort on design and not enough on quality. We build tools to make design easier rather than making quality easier for developers..."
To that I would say, design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality. What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.
In fact, I think the surge in attention to design can largely be seen as a 'catching up effect'. For many years, all the other kids in the party got a lot of attention, now design is getting attention as well, but I'm not at all sure it's getting disproportionate attention.
Finally, new shortcuts for assessing quality always exist, and they're almost by definition at the cutting edge of their field. Maybe that's not 'pretty looks' anymore, and that's ok. Other areas of rare craftsmanship are still alive and kicking - communication quality is a good example. Lousy copy on pretty pixels abound.