What makes a conference good isn't the IEEE label but rather the reputation of the conference itself and its corresponding ability to attract a high quality program committee.
The important point here is that there isn't a shortcut to evaluating conference quality. You have to know your field, know who is worth listening to and who isn't, know what the top conferences are, what the mediocre conferences are and so forth. If a new conference springs up, you need to be able to judge whether to pay attention by looking at the PC.
> Of course there are regional IEEE conferences. But in general, the international IEEE conferences and journals by the bigger societies are probably the best ones out there.
You can't really make general statements like that. For example, CAV proceedings are published by Springer (http://www.springer.com/computer/theoretical+computer+scienc...). JPDC is a well-regarded journal in the parallel computing community that is published by Elsevier.
And a "regional" conference doesn't mean it's a bad conference. DATE (http://www.date-conference.com/) is probably the second best design automation conference behind DAC. ASPDAC, ATVA, APLAS, FSTTCS are some well-regarded regional conferences and there are plenty more like these. Not all of these are IEEE sponsored either.
> I have published quite a bit in the physical sciences/engineering field and in my experience the IEEE journals have a far better peer review process than AIP, ACS, Elsevier and even NPG. The same goes for the conferences.
I'm not trying to slight IEEE here. I looked through my publication list and it turns out all my papers are in IEEE conferences and journals! But on the other hand, a few of them could easily have ended up in a venue like CAV and this wouldn't magically make them worse papers.
The key point here I want to make here is this: there is no substitute for knowing your field, if you're judging conference quality by the IEEE label, you're doing something wrong.