I'm an US ex-pat living and working in a developing country, and I see this situation all the time. For the first couple years, I would lose my mind when it happened. Then I realized that it's not an intelligence or skill thing; it's a cultural and communication thing.
- A friend of mine here once hired a guy to paint his ceiling. The painter did a good job on the ceiling, but didn't put down tarps and got paint everywhere on the walls and floor. My friend was understandably angry, but the painter couldn't understand what the problem was. From the painter's point of view, my friend didn't specify that the floor and walls not get paint on them.
- I hired a crew to build an addition to our office. After they put in the floor, I realized that it was lumpy and misshapen. When I confronted them about it, they didn't consider it a problem. I didn't say the floor needed to be flat.
- I asked a smart, college-educated colleague to fix one of our broken clocks. She ended up just switching the clock with one of the working clocks. I had to go back and specify that all clocks need to work.
If you're going to outsource, you absolutely need someone who can bridge this gap. What feels half-ass and unacceptable under any circumstances to you and me, could just be normal and expected for a lot of people. And similarly, what feels normal and acceptable to us can feel obnoxiously strict and overbearing for others.
The trick is to understand that for any given situation, the meaning of "acceptable" varies from culture to culture. And it has nothing to do with skill or intelligence.