Exactly. I only really lob softball queries at DDG. I use ! to go to the first result on queries I know are going to have the right match first. Everything else I proxy to google through !g. DDG is great but the search quality (or perhaps the size of the data they index) is just not nearly up to par with Google.
This is a shameless plug, but using !g constantly on DDG led me to write GooseGooseGo, a trivial wrapper for DDG you can clone & run on localhost: http://goosegoosego.com
Doesn't that mean DDG is a pretty good proxy.