> the rest of us can do high quality work without being paid for each feature/bug fixed, yet these individuals cannot

Yes they can not. It is not high quality work but high quality results for sales guy. Developer work is complete once service deployed. It wouldn't be developer failure if user volume doesn't reach x thousands per day on their web service. It would definitely be salesman failure sales does not reach x dollars in certain duration.

Developer equivalent of sales would be to say "I have distributed x sales brochures and call x number of clients this month. My job is done."