...honestly the quality of some of the kids meals are pretty poor though.
I agree. Aside from the salmon (small portion, but nicely grilled) at a few places or a hamburger at Carnation, my kids don't like the kids meals--which is problematic if we're doing something like a PtN or WOC dinner, since I'm not going to pay the adult fixed price for an 8-year-old!
It's not that my kids have advanced palates or anything--they don't like a lot of "grown-up" preparations of food, though we do make them eat them at home if we cooked them--but they do like to eat a variety of things over vacation (not burgers or pizza for every meal), and don't like fried foods any more than they like bland ones (chicken breast with nothing done to it at Blue Bayou!) offered to them.
If it's not a fixed-price dinner and it's just the two kids and me, we try to figure out a meal that I can split with DS8 or one that DD11 is willing to share with DS8. The kitchen is always willing to change the sides, too, if the kids are sharing with each other--for instance, plain-ish vegetables instead of non-kid-friendly vegetables that have "stuff" on them.
(The lack of interesting kid options isn't just a problem at Disney. We encounter the same thing at restaurants in Monterey when we visit, where the regular menus have, for instance, a lot of fish and seafood and other such choices, but the children's menu offers just pizza, pasta with marinara, burgers, grilled cheese, mac-n-cheese, and chicken nuggets. To quote DS8, "Ew, nothing with 'nugget' in the name! Aren't we in a fancy restaurant?")