In response to:
Buy or make better quality bags.
I don't expect most people to be able to manage what I did in making my bags out of industrial scrap from the parachute plant I worked in, but its not beyond the moderately-competent home sewer with home equipment to make bags by recycling the good parts of old jeans or buying cotton canvas. Bags can also be knitted, crocheted, knotted via macrame, or even made from duct tape (available in colors and patterns specifically for crafting (but probably not washable)).
You could even use old pillowcases.
I don't use them on principle, I use them because I shop at discount stores that don't offer bags at all. Its not nearly as big a deal as people make it out to be.
San Francisco passed America's first ban on plastic bags in chain groceries and drugstores in 2007. In a research paper for the Institute for Law and Economics, law professors Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright crunched state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne illness deaths and figured that the San Francisco ban "led to an increase in infections immediately upon implementation."
They found a 46 percent rise in food-borne illness deaths. The bottom line: "Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths."
So is San Francisco's bag ban a killer? Conceivably, yes, but probably...
But making out that its some great inconvenience to use cloth bags or that there are horrible, insurmountable flaws to the very concept of cloth bags is just as absurd as the idea of the government dictating grocery bags.