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The issue is not quality but requirements. As long as the environment was permissive enough it was a lot better to remain on the surface: a WW2 era u-boat sailing on the surface with its diesel engines has greater mobility than a boat optimized for underwater perfomance and usually better situational awareness than what could be obtained from GHG and periscopes. So while in truth radar and the increasing importance of air power should have made clear that the surface night torpedo attack so much cherished by Donitz had a fast approaching expire date and the future trend would be towards underwater operation almost nobody was looking that forward. The japanese had a prototype elektroboot in 1938 capable of making 21 knots submerged but they did not order production types until 1943 under pressure from allied ASW. The italian navy had a workable snorkel developed in the interwar period, never installed.Did the british and the americans do something? Nothing deployed during the war I recall. In short abandoning the surface was usually only done under duress.
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On further thought the point deserves some additional food for thought to clear some misconceptions. Building an attack submarine optimized for underwater performances was not a new idea, at the end of WW1 the Royal Navy did exactly that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_R-class_submarine
Granted there were problems in the execution however they still built something that was at least a quarter of a century ahead of any other existing submarine. Yet the trade offs were simply not worth it for most submarine missions in that era and it is significant that some were in fact modified to improve surface performance.