Nope. I don’t find it inadequate and I suspect neither do the vast majority of users. The overwhelming reports of dissatisfaction would be found where?
I can only speak for group: Digital B&W The Print. This group certainly represents a notable gathering of people interested in producing the best B&W prints available and is quite likely more B&W centric than the group you refer to (although that is conjecture on my part).
You prefer the output using QTR, great.
Quite the contrary. I do not use Quadtone RIP. I used to but I don't anymore. I use Epson ABW with QTR Create ICC profiles. That's quite different. I abandoned the use of a dedicated B&W inks, a "full-control" RIP such as QTR (I also explored Imageprint at one point) in favour of Epson ABW when it came out. I made a personal decision to sacrifice quality for convenience. I knew full well that ABW wasn't going to produce the best available output but, when profiled, it was ok for my needs. (And, yes, I have prints made with QTR and dedicated ink sets by people such as Paul Roark and, yes, they are far superior to ABW's output.)
It's worth noting here that QTR Create ICC did not come about as a fix for Epson ABW. Rather it came about to address the shortcoming in any B&W workflow that didn't rely on ICC colour management. It came about, in no small part, as a result of heavy badgering by me on the Digital B&W The Print group in response to an issue typically experienced (at that time) by all users of RIPs (including QTR) to produce B&W images. Users, and the issue was, of course, most noticeable in printing to matt papers, typically complained of "flat prints that were considerably lighter than those on screen" despite having correctly set ink limits, linearised ink channels etc. I argued (I had a lot more free time then) that this was directly caused by the lack of gamut management between an image file which could range from perfect black to perfect white to a printer gamut (albeit with linearised L*) that had a seriously deficient black and less than ideal white and that indeed such output was to be expected as a result. I likely never had the terminology right nor a complete understanding of the issues - I am not a colour management professional - but I did ask an important question: why can't we extract that part of ICC colour management that pertains to luminance management and apply it to B&W printing. QTR Create ICC began life as tone curves in PS trying to address this issue, then kTRC curves in somewhat bastardised ICC profiles and finally with the necessary ICC profile features to provide soft-proofing. Roy had the brains and programming expertise to generate the simple little droplet application that QTR Create ICC is today. It was equally applicable to Quadtone RIP (or any other B&W RIP) and Epson ABW.
I do believe (again, my opinion) Epson encountered this "flat and lighter than expected" issue very directly when they built ABW. It is no coincidence in my view that the default ABW setting is "darker". Whether they understood the issue completely or simply fudged an answer I don't know, but they did feel the need to introduce curves in the driver to darken the otherwise too-light output. Perhaps they introduced the exact appropriate tone curve, recognising that it could be handled by a special ICC profile but baulked at adding this complication to the workflow. The output would suggest they didn't.
Well people who like to send endless time and money on differing solutions and then need to convince others that doing something any other way is inferior will probably agree with you.
We all make trade-offs and sometimes we simply aren't aware of what is available to us. QTR Create ICC is available to anyone who has access to a densitometer or spectrophotometer. Those who own the latter are presumably already making their own colour profiles. To dismiss the easily-achieved performance increase available to these people as a "hack" is rather shortsighted.