Why don't more students demand "I want to be taught by people demonstrably good at what they do"?
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One thing to do is to ask students: what do you think makes a good teacher? What do you want to get out of it? Can you be more selective? It took me a long time to realize it was better to select on professors rather than subject.
Great prof on okay subject >> okay prof on "great" subject. Or to put it another way, the great profs made me realize I was very interested in things I didn't know I loved. Whereas the mediocre ones put me to sleep on subjects that should have been 
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A pretty common faculty retort is "students don't know how to select good profs". While that's sometimes true, overall I'm very unsympathetic. Even if they _are_ bad at it, the way they'll get better is by doing it & reflecting on it.
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You are exactly right. Student evaluations can be a decent instrument (especially the comments) when the questions are right, but they never ask whether a professor is striving to be great or knows what greatness is.
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