Quality isn't only sacrificed due to mismanaged loss in the pipeline. It's also at odds with delivery speed, feature breadth, cost, and itself. Quality is at odds with quality, because quality is not single dimensional!
Quality is not at odds with cost and delivery speed. That's a common misconception, but empirically all sorts of people (perhaps starting with Shewhart) have discovered that a good process leads to lower cost, higher quality, faster delivery.
If anything, low quality is what increases cost and delivery time, by adding expensive inspection, re-work, warehousing of defective product, missed returns on development time, customer disappointment, loss of feedback.
Quality achieved by exhortation ("Try harder!") is at odds with all sorts of things. Quality achieved by straightening out a process designed to produce defects in large numbers -- not at odds with anything, except perhaps office politics.
