I remember early on in my SC career, having a discussion on another SC client board, with a guy who also did mid-range and high-ish-end escorts ($300-$500/hour girls). He was telling me that strippers are way hotter than escorts. I told him that I"d looked at escort ads, and at least in their pics, there's lots of $300/hour escorts as hot as any stripper. He just laughed at my naivete. "That's just what they look like in pictures, what you see when you open the door is an entirely different story. I could go to a high-end strip club on a saturday night, and see 20 strippers that are hotter than any escort I've ever seen". And this is a story basically repeated on monger boards. Hell, even among my group of SC buddies, a number of us do other things -- AMPs, escorts, bodyrubs -- and we're unanimous: very few girls from other areas of the sex industry compete well against the top 20% hottest girls in even a mid-range strip club, much less a high-end one. I don't know anyone who sees the mythical super-exclusive $1000+ escorts to compare; for all I know, they are the hottest, but I have no way to knowing that.
On top of that, the equivalent of OTC-equivalent activities -- and especially unpaid time, like dinners and the like, which are easy to score with strippers -- are universally harder to score. Everywhere else in the industry, the girls keep up more walls, are more consistent in demanding $ for any of their time, and are less likely to be hard partying during working hours, leading to better (or, for us, worse) judgement than many strippers have.
In all, strippers = best looking and sexiest in the sex industry, plus easiest to spend time with without every second being on the meter = best girls in the sex biz


If most escorts looked as good as strippers, I wouldn't be going to strip clubs.
Your friend is right, you see these amazing photos, usually focusing in on one certain asset the provider has (like a great ass, great boobs or a pretty face) but then they show up at the door and I have almost always been disappointed. I have also found most of the respectable escorts have day jobs, and do escorting on the side, heck some of them even have husbands and boyfriends and tell you about them too, certainly a mood killer.
The one thing that almost all escorts have are rules. No kissing, No CIM, No BBBJ, etc. etc. I find strippers (in general) have a lot less rules.
Lastly, if a stripper comes to my hotel room, she's not watching the clock. Most escorts will leave when the hour, or two hours is over. The good ones may go over a bit, but they're not spending the night for free, where many strippers have (for me) in the past.