you're blending practice areas again, so i can't coherently respond. but...

  My understanding is that people that choose public defender instead of private lawyer in criminal cases have statistically worse outcomes.

that's an intimidatingly fraught claim to address. what i can say i know for sure is that sometimes it's true, and sometimes it's not. it's a seemingly impossible statistical comparison to make when you consider the ambiguity of a 'better outcome' versus a 'worse outcome' alone.

  From my perspective it seems blatant that people with deep pockets are more likely to have better outcomes in lawsuits.

would you be surprised to learn that there are litigants with pockets so deep, they actually file "strategic" suits they know they can't win against poorer defendants? but they file anyway knowing the cost will effectively ruin whoever or whatever they're suing, even if it never makes it out of the most preliminary of phases. again, what's the 'better outcome' in a situation like that? withdrawing, and therefore 'losing' the suit, but bankrupting your opponent in the process? to me that's the antithesis of a legal remedy.

so yeah, criminal defense, litigation, and any other practice area for that matter is often quite a bit more nuanced than 'expensive lawyer good, cheap lawyer bad.'