If the price of a book comes anywhere into your definition of quality writing, then our ideas about quality (not to mention writing) are so radically different I see no way that you could ever understand me or I understand you ... therefore, there seems to be no point in picking your definition apart.
But to return to worldbuilding, the subject of this thread:
There are, of course, ways of revealing things about the setting without resorting to an info-dump. The way that characters address each other can tell a great deal about the society they live in: the formality (or lack of it), the modes of deference within a family (or lack of them), the class structure, etc. You can tell something about the religion or the superstitions by the gestures of respect, blessing, or protection the characters reflexively make under certain circumstances or when certain words are spoken. The clothing people wear can speak worlds about their ideas of modesty and decorum -- a society where women (or men) go veiled is going to be different in some essential ways from one where they go bare-faced.
You can sprinkle in these and other clues throughout a story, so that gradually they build up a very detailed picture. This method does require a little something of the reader, because they have to pick up on the inferences, but at least that's asking less than expecting them to commit to memory long passages explaining religion, or class, or gender politics.
But to do this right, it seems to me that the writer has to have the setting very clearly in mind as he or she writes. Whatever worldbuilding has preceded the writing, whether it's a lot or a little, it has to have been thoroughly internalized. The writer has to know it and feel it without constant recourse to his or her notebooks.
In fact (coming at this in the most roundabout way possible), that might have something to do with what Harrison was talking about in terms of writing triumphing over worldbuilding; perhaps he was saying that internalizing the setting is more important than mapping it out.
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