Completely honest answer, not trying to be dismissive -- DuckDuckGo gives me fine results for most of my queries. I don't reach for Google that much unless I'm doing a deep dive into a problem that's hard to search in general, in which case I often find I'm aggregating results from multiple search engines.
I find Google better at some results -- occasionally Google "gets" what I'm trying to search for better than DuckDuckGo does and zeroes in more specifically on the topic. Sometimes I find that DuckDuckGo does the same. I particularly think that DuckDuckGo's smart cards are just (to me) obviously better than Google's. DuckDuckGo's news is really bad for me, I guess -- I pretty much always use Google News for current events.
This comes up pretty much every time that DuckDuckGo comes up, and I have seen it come up so often, that when I step back and try to come up with a semi-impartial reading of which engine is better, the only conclusion I can reach is that a lot of people have different opinions about how a search engine should react when they search. I think different search results are an acquired taste, and there just isn't an objective right or wrong answer to which engine is better.
So it's a little like if someone was recommending eating vegetables, and you asked, "but what do you do about the crap taste of spinach?" You have a real problem in that I want to help you find foods you like, but at the same time, I'm not trying to "solve" the way spinach tastes. I don't agree that spinach is "wrong", it's just not what you want.
From that point of view, having multiple, diverse search engines is good, and we'd all be served better by using multiple search engines. I don't want DuckDuckGo to just be a Google clone; part of the reason I use it is because of their different results. I do want it to improve and get better, but I disagree that morphing into Google 2.0 will accomplish that for me.
If you like Google's style of search results, then what you really need is a trustworthy replacement for Startpage. You need Google but without the tracking -- and DuckDuckGo isn't just Google without the tracking. I think you're justified in telling anyone who says, "just use DuckDuckGo" to shove off, since DuckDuckGo isn't solving your problem. But I don't agree that DuckDuckGo has bad results, it has a different flavor than you're used to.