[Swannie]

Here here!

It would be lovely if vendors would bid based on their experience, and be compensated for it, at a time and materials basis. The more experience and better you prove to be, the higher we're willing to pay for a better outcome, sooner.

Except that world is rife with bait and switch. And writing the code that delivers the spec is just a small part of the picture. Companies are terrible at specifying the non-functionals, delivery process expectations, operational requirements, supportability requirements, etc. When they do get it right, the costs go up, because many places quote without any concept of these things.

The sad reality is that the people who get asked to quote for these things in the software world are generally clueless about the actual domain, out of touch, and wildly wrong most of the time. And the people that specify these things are often barely any better. And lets face it, software developers are also terrible at quoting times to do a task, though that can be mitigated with a lot of experience of that task and the code base to do it on.