I suggest a quality downgrade mechanic - taking an item with quality (i.e. Rare) and downgrading it to a lower quality (i.e. Uncommon). This would be extremely useful right now whilst preparing to travel into space I'm accumulating a huge number of uncommon green circuits which I don't really have ...

Came here to report the same thing, thought I was going mad trying to see what the maximum damage buff was. As you can see the 40->60 is displayed for n+1 and n+2 technologies.