Why introduce the quadratic cost? After all, aren't we primarily interested in the number of images correctly classified by the network? Why not try to maximize that number directly, rather than minimizing a proxy measure like the quadratic cost? The problem with that is that the number of images correctly classified is not a smooth function of the weights and biases in the network. For the most part, making small changes to the weights and biases won't cause any change at all in the number of training images classified correctly. That makes it difficult to figure out how to change the weights and biases to get improved performance. If we instead use a smooth cost function like the quadratic cost it turns out to be easy to figure out how to make small changes in the weights and biases so as to get an improvement in the cost. That's why we focus first on minimizing the quadratic cost, and only after that will we examine the classification accuracy.