I'm afraid of reddit influence

[NineNine]

That's Reddit-style mentality. Make a drama out of nothing, just to show one's importance.

It isn't so unreasonable though. If someone has to recommit a few hours of their weekend to rebuild the thing, they are entitled to their initial reaction. And while the idea of doing an older version is semi-reasonable, you're avoiding bug fixes to make your factory work your way if you commit to that.

Under what circumstances would anybody have to rebuild anything? Wube doesn't force anybody to upgrade anything. You can play any version of Factorio, for, as far as I know, forever. So yes, it's really just hysterics over nothing.

[coffee-factorio]

Under what circumstances would anybody have to rebuild anything? Wube doesn't force anybody to upgrade anything. You can play any version of Factorio, for, as far as I know, forever. So yes, it's really just hysterics over nothing.

So, to put a point to why I suggested retitling and/or moving this to balance:

If we're talking about getting a software update period, it's easy for someone to dismiss you on the basis that there's mechanics to that like automatic steam updates or bugfixes.

But we don't have to meet emotion with emotion. If someone mods that back in, keep the current version and they don't have to pull an upgrade. But you do have to convince them to trust the mod community and that process.

Harder realize that if you say "well, you're hysterical for the point of being hysterical". They're entitled to their emotions but there's a logic where we can still respect them and ourselves. But like... lets be honest.

It's reddit. There's an entire shitpost community on reddit for this game. Hilarious read, makes it damn easy to do what is above.

[meganothing]

And while the idea of doing an older version is semi-reasonable, you're avoiding bug fixes to make your factory work your way if you commit to that.

Wait, the OP had a working factory before the update, that is the whole reason why he doesn't want to update to a then non-working factory. So why would he need those bug fixes?

[coffee-factorio]

Wait, the OP had a working factory before the update, that is the whole reason why he doesn't want to update to a then non-working factory. So why would he need those bug fixes?

You still have to respect people and say "Yes, and... you may have a point. We can help you along the path to better or at least to a point where you have as good." The community is also grown by DoshDoshington launching trains at things, and by Nillaus doing city blocks.

As for what OP said... On this one, OP doesn't necessarily believe a balance change is harmful and I can respect that. A build they had was never mentioned. And if they have one, more power to them; but in this matter I don't think having one is really relevant unless you're talking about the mechanic specifically instead of a discussion on reddit.

Hence the suggestion (again). For a change of topic and venue.

If we want to talk about balance and not be subject to reddit's influence. It's a personal choice to take that step.

[Shirasik]

Disallowing quality in asteroid reprocessing recipes don't make any sense because:
1) asteroid reprocessing is pure fantasy from the very beginning so as long as magic is allowed then nothing shall be disallowed;
2) reprocessing recipes has 20% material loss (it converts 1 chunk into 0.4+0.2+0.2 = 0.8) so actually asteroid reprocessing is refining which must have built-in quality improvement.

As for LDS recipe in foundries.. meh. In the essence Wube confirms that they aren't capable to implement quality for fluids and never will.

[h.q.droid]

Come to think of it, how is 2.1 going to come? Will there be stuff like 2.1 (rc3)? Or they just dump a big patch as 2.1.0 then refine it over the sub-sub-versions?

[Stargateur]

As for LDS recipe in foundries.. meh. In the essence Wube confirms that they aren't capable to implement quality for fluids and never will.

Not confirmed but quality fluid have been teased by a dev on discord.

Come to think of it, how is 2.1 going to come? Will there be stuff like 2.1 (rc3)? Or they just dump a big patch as 2.1.0 then refine it over the sub-sub-versions?

I would like we have a 2.1 on beta branch of steam to test it before and I think it will be like that.

[Shirasik]

Not confirmed but quality fluid have been teased by a dev on discord.

If so then restricting foundries' LDS recipe to common only don't make any sense. Extension of quality system to fluids will solve all awkwardness related to things such as "plastic-only" legendary LDS so even temporal content removal isn't needed.

[Khagan]

Not confirmed but quality fluid have been teased by a dev on discord.

If so then restricting foundries' LDS recipe to common only don't make any sense.

Indeed. OTOH, quality fluids would make getting quality holmium much easier.

[Tertius]

Not confirmed but quality fluid have been teased by a dev on discord.

If so then restricting foundries' LDS recipe to common only don't make any sense. Extension of quality system to fluids will solve all awkwardness related to things such as "plastic-only" legendary LDS so even temporal content removal isn't needed.

Simply blocking the "casting lds" recipe from using quality modules cannot be the solution, because that's too much nerf. There must be a solution between current behavior and just the assembler recipe. May be because of such balancing challenges the 2.1 release is still work in progress and was not even teased by the devs. As far as I remember, the devs originally thought to take 1-2 months for the fixes in 2.1. That was three quarters of a year ago. I guess we will get slightly more than just small adjustments and small improvements of mechanics. I guess they feel the game turned out not as complete as they wanted.

[Shirasik]

Simply blocking the "casting lds" recipe from using quality modules cannot be the solution

No, as stated in screenshot in opening post, devs planning to remove LDS casting recipes in range from uncommon to legendary. The thing is casting LDS recipe requires two fluids which can't have quality and one solid input which is plastic. Meanwhile plastic requires petroleum gas (which is fluid) and coal. So long story short after you unlock foundries all you need to create legendary LDS is legendary coal and some other common-quality stuff. Simple, straightforward and efficient. Just like Factorio's trailer of 2016: be efficient.

[MeduSalem]

I'm with reddit. Nerfing emergent gameplay is bad, just like how nerfing landmine and long-nose space platforms is bad.

The quality system, as the devs have intended, is very poorly designed. It's self contradictory as the yield probability design encourages using quality in every step, but everything else like conflicting with speed module and not-stacking-across-quality work against it. It's only playable right now because of asteroid rolling and LDS shuffling.

I agree to this notion about the quality system. There are some inherent issues with how it is done currently that are just... urgh. I did not write for nothing in another thread yesterday that I feel like in the all the years I played Factorio it is the worst addition they ever made simply because of how it works. Quality items themselves are nice, but the way to get them is not. ^^

I also agree with nerfing being bad (for most part), because that people are even doing some of the practices is not the root of the problem, but rather that the quality system inherently is annoying that people become creative about how to exploit it. So quality system should rather be looked at at the core to make it a more fun process, instead of "curing" the symptoms. Because curing the symptoms would not change that the quality mechanic is rotten at the core.

To be honest as an intermediate solution I would not even mind if the quality chances of modules were changed and buffed up such that you can go >100% quality, guaranteeing that the output item will be the next tier level. And the excess chance beyond >100% also being a flat chance to go 2 quality levels up and whatnot, and if you manage to stack 200% quality then the resulting item is guaaranteed to be 2 levels higher than the inputs, and so on and so forth. Skipping the entire atrocious recycling process for the most part (except for the early quality game when you don't have better modules yet) and actually do better quality items through a normal crafting cascade. Then it would also be possible to use speed beacons with them more reliable by trading the excess quality if you want to or use productivity modules more often. Wouldn't even care if the quality modules quadruple the energy consumption, it would still be better than it is currently.

At least the 1/10 decrease in chance for each quality tier level is bullsh*t because an uncommon item is not 10 times better than a normal one. A legendary one is not 1000 times better than a normal one. I fail to see why it should take 1000 times more resources to craft a legendary item that on average has 2.5 better stats than a normal one. It is just a horrible resource sink that only really benefits megabase players who can get ontop of the issue by crunching out the science to increase infinite researches for productivity to 300% until they break even with resource consumption where it does not hurt them, but not for people who rather like to play tall than wide. It is obvious they made this design choice because they were occupied playing their internal development megabase, forgetting that the average player will never make a huge megabase and hence will never have the resources to throw at the infinite research to battle the quality system.

But anyway, this trend towards favoring megabases is like a common thread running through the entire SA expansion and that is part of why it is a slogfest to play compared to the basegame.

As for LDS recipe in foundries.. meh. In the essence Wube confirms that they aren't capable to implement quality for fluids and never will.

Not confirmed but quality fluid have been teased by a dev on discord.

While I would be curious for quality fluids, because as others mentioned would make some item quality cycles better, I wonder how quality fluids would even turn out in practice with how quality works currently. How would that even work in the machines. Dump all the different quality fluids into one single output pipe which then need to be filtered with pumps? That would be a glorious mess to say the least. And probably the main reason why they refrained from quality fluids with SA release because they could not figure out a nice way to do it. ^^

And ontop of that you cannot recycle fluids... so cannot be properly upcycled in the quantities needed to keep up with what you can do with solid items. So they would have to allow recycling of fluids to their ingredients as well because otherwise quality fluids would be a bottleneck. ^^

Anyway, another reason why I feel like they should sit down and rework the quality system from scratch to make it work entirely differently, such that fluids can also have quality. And If a different system would be better than it is currently I wouldn't even mind a second if it entirely bricks all my quality upcycler setups because I would love to see these atrocities gone. I would welcome the day I can drag the deconstruct planner over them.

[coffee-factorio]

I don't think it's playable in the way other systems are.

I think that the system inherently produces results which force a person to be inconsistent.
Humanity may be able to function in a manner which produces advanced languages. But there's nothing that particularly likes handling inconsistent and tolerates randomness without taking on the characteristics of it.

It isn't unbalanced or unplayable but it's nearly impossible to scale it without a tremendous investment of resources. I think it's a 100% accurate depiction of the phenomenon. Down to the modules being red and white. While those two colors are attractive together, they don't indicate health.

I wouldn't hold your breath for the creation of a system that is intentionally designed to scale well (like the rest of Factorio and nearly all mods). After two years of development, I'm not seeing anything to indicate that Wube didn't realize what it had. On the contrary, Kovarex asked "What the harm" of this system could be in FFF's. I thought that was peak humor back then too, the man does his homework and he knows what gambling addictions are. Bold artistic move if it's functioning as intended, got to say.

[Shirasik]

While I would be curious for quality fluids, because as others mentioned would make some item quality cycles better, I wonder how quality fluids would even turn out in practice with how quality works currently. How would that even work in the machines. Dump all the different quality fluids into one single output pipe which then need to be filtered with pumps? That would be a glorious mess to say the least. And probably the main reason why they refrained from quality fluids with SA release because they could not figure out a nice way to do it. ^^

And ontop of that you cannot recycle fluids... so cannot be properly upcycled in the quantities needed to keep up with what you can do with solid items. So they would have to allow recycling of fluids to their ingredients as well because otherwise quality fluids would be a bottleneck. ^^

Anyway, another reason why I feel like they should sit down and rework the quality system from scratch to make it work entirely differently, such that fluids can also have quality. And If a different system would be better than it is currently I wouldn't even mind a second if it entirely bricks all my quality upcycler setups because I would love to see these atrocities gone. I would welcome the day I can drag the deconstruct planner over them.

Long story short game has no explanation what quality is. Let's say we took one common iron plate and one legendary iron plate. How they differ? What properties do they have that differ enough to make a conclusion what one plate is common and another is legendary? How exactly can we compare them?

[Tertius]

Long story short game has no explanation what quality is. Let's say we took one common iron plate and one legendary iron plate. How they differ? What properties do they have that differ enough to make a conclusion what one plate is common and another is legendary? How exactly can we compare them?

I don't know how it happened, but I know what quality is about. I had my difficulties to start implementing it, but what quality is about in general was never an issue for me. There was nobody I asked, I just got enough information on it own. So in my opinion, there is enough information around. If you keep your eyes open, it will find you.

How it is available in the game can be clearly seen by exploring the recipe selection dialog of any production machine and choose a recipe with higher than normal quality. Doing this will immediately show that you need quality ingredients, and the question that immediately comes up is how to get these quality ingredients, which will explain why the game offered you quality modules for research, because this is the mechanism to create quality items from non quality items.
How quality items differ from non quality items is visualized in Factoriopedia (the light blue dot behind the stats).

And that's all you need to know about quality. Everything beyond that is how to build production lines to actually craft quality items, but that's the usual engineering task that's the core of Factorio.

[MeduSalem]

Long story short game has no explanation what quality is. [...]

While definitely true that what quality means in terms of the game and how quality works is poorly explained in game as well... however this is not even part of the gripes I have with the quality system. xD


Anyway I totally know how it works since I am using it myself. I just feel like it is terrible how it works.

At the very foundation of the things I don't like about it... I personally think it is against the original spirit of the game of making efficient factories. Simply because you intentionally have to repeatedly recycle items every time with a 75% loss. This is the opposite of being efficient. All for a chance to return better quality ingredients, because of how making better quality items in the first place through a natural crafting cascade would be too unreliable & inefficient to produce a steady stream of better quality items. Sure, resources are infinite with SA and even so a lot of the wasteful process can be made up with better quality quality-modules to increase chances or productivity to get more chances for rolls and thereby make up for the loss of items caused by recycling, but it doesn't change that at the core we are still dumping stuff into the trash on purpose because that is the most "efficient" way to battle the gambling machine.

I also dislike the pure idea of returning better quality ingredients from recycling. Imagine if in reality to get a better quality smartphone they would repeatedly disassemble it and by chance it magically results in a better display component or better battery than originally which then are being put back together for a higher quality product. What the hell. How? But apparently in the Factorio universe that is how it works. I sure remember a lot of discussions back in the day similarly about productivity, but at least productivity you can explain by refining a process and thereby either stretching input materials to make more items out of it or overall being less wasteful in the manufacturing process. So productivity has its place. But how recyclers return quality ingredients from a shittier product is...

Mind Blown

Mind blown.gif (6.03 MiB) Viewed 144 times

Is this how Apple makes their iPhones? According to Factorio it is. ^^

They also said it would be "optional", and sure, no one holds me at gunpoint forcing me to use it. But leaving a potential 2.5x increase in throughput for key production areas on the table or being able to make more space efficient designs (especially with how space platforms are) makes me beg the question...

Is it though

Is it though.gif (275.08 KiB) Viewed 144 times

I also dislike that to be able to do quality reliable so you can do a more "tall" playstyle you actually need to go "wide" to be able to afford to dump the resources into it in the first place, so while it looked like they wanted to address the concern some people raised back then who wanted to do more efficient & compact factories rather than huge megabases, it still ended up a feature that actually favors big base players over people who make little factories simply because of the amount of resources you need to throw at the blender.


And then there is this... Every time I read the meta talks on forum, reddit or elsewhere about which item <x> is best to dump into the recycler repeatedly so you can get quality ingredients back to be used for product <y> you actually want, I roll my eyes because this is what Factorio now boils down to. We used to talk about various optimal setups to make various items, not which way is the best to trash items. I feel it is anti-factorio-esque to the point it grinds the teeth off of the gearwheel in the Factorio logo. ^^

Anyway then there are people who eventually find shortcuts like with LDS shuffle or asteroid recycling because they have good return rates. I cannot blame them, because the system is terrible, so from my perspective they are right if they fight poison with poison.


So overall, I feel there are several things that are conceptually busted about how quality works. That is my opinion about it after 9 months.

I will continue to use it, simply because it is there and I paid for it, and because in principle, as I said previously, I like the idea of quality items even though I wish the process to get them was different. But even though I will try to make the most out of it how it is currently I will sure not grow to like the mechanic as it is because I cannot shut my eyes and pretend I would.

[meganothing]

I agree to this notion about the quality system. There are some inherent issues with how it is done currently that are just... urgh. I did not write for nothing in another thread yesterday that I feel like in the all the years I played Factorio it is the worst addition they ever made simply because of how it works. Quality items themselves are nice, but the way to get them is not. ^^

I also agree with nerfing being bad (for most part), because that people are even doing some of the practices is not the root of the problem, but rather that the quality system inherently is annoying that people become creative about how to exploit it. So quality system should rather be looked at at the core to make it a more fun process, instead of "curing" the symptoms. Because curing the symptoms would not change that the quality mechanic is rotten at the core.

The wide-spread aversion players have against nerfing and changes in general is astonishing. The game that is universally lauded for its exemplary balance, Starcraft, would never have reached that balance if the developers had whimped out because of subconscious sensibilities of the players, the same sensibilities a baby has when anything is taken away from it even if it was ignoring it before.

Players try to exploit any exploitable system, this can't be made into evidence of annoying systems.

The quality system is, by the way, my favourite feature of SpaceAge, I have been tinkering with it for dozens of hours in my current game, and note, I am not a megafactory player. And have not used any of the shortcuts like LDS

To be honest as an intermediate solution I would not even mind if the quality chances of modules were changed and buffed up such that you can go >100% quality, guaranteeing that the output item will be the next tier level. And the excess chance beyond >100% also being a flat chance to go 2 quality levels up and whatnot, and if you manage to stack 200% quality then the resulting item is guaaranteed to be 2 levels higher than the inputs, and so on and so forth. Skipping the entire atrocious recycling process for the most part (except for the early quality game when you don't have better modules yet) and actually do better quality items through a normal crafting cascade. Then it would also be possible to use speed beacons with them more reliable by trading the excess quality if you want to or use productivity modules more often. Wouldn't even care if the quality modules quadruple the energy consumption, it would still be better than it is currently.

Why should Wube accelerate a system that is probably meant to provide a long-time occupation for players? It is one of a few possible goals you could select in SpaceAge to provide long-term fun to some people beside megabases. And if you don't have that time and still think you MUST use quality then there are the LDS shortcuts you can use.

So you have 3 options:
1) Do not use quality if you don't like it
2) Use it normally and have long time fun tinkering with it
3) Wait until you can use a shortcut and get legendary items the fast way

Is 3 too few options for you?

At least the 1/10 decrease in chance for each quality tier level is bullsh*t because an uncommon item is not 10 times better than a normal one. A legendary one is not 1000 times better than a normal one. I fail to see why it should take 1000 times more resources to craft a legendary item that on average has 2.5 better stats than a normal one. It is just a horrible resource sink that only really benefits megabase players who can get ontop of the issue by crunching out the science to increase infinite researches for productivity to 300% until they break even with resource consumption where it does not hurt them, but not for people who rather like to play tall than wide. It is obvious they made this design choice because they were occupied playing their internal development megabase, forgetting that the average player will never make a huge megabase and hence will never have the resources to throw at the infinite research to battle the quality system.

But anyway, this trend towards favoring megabases is like a common thread running through the entire SA expansion and that is part of why it is a slogfest to play compared to the basegame.

Space Age is not for megabase players. I have seen lots of post where they complain how long it takes for them to develop each planet until they can really start building megabases, how they have to redo their factories whenever new techs are available, quality being one of the main culprits. Megabase players probably need the mod that conflates all planets and their features back into nauvis or simply play the basegame if they really want to have a similar experience to 1.0.

Space Age was a gift to all sphagetti-players like me, after the basegame had its focus on megabase players (at least that was my impression)

As for LDS recipe in foundries.. meh. In the essence Wube confirms that they aren't capable to implement quality for fluids and never will.

Not confirmed but quality fluid have been teased by a dev on discord.

While I would be curious for quality fluids, because as others mentioned would make some item quality cycles better, I wonder how quality fluids would even turn out in practice with how quality works currently. How would that even work in the machines. Dump all the different quality fluids into one single output pipe which then need to be filtered with pumps? That would be a glorious mess to say the least. And probably the main reason why they refrained from quality fluids with SA release because they could not figure out a nice way to do it. ^^

And ontop of that you cannot recycle fluids... so cannot be properly upcycled in the quantities needed to keep up with what you can do with solid items. So they would have to allow recycling of fluids to their ingredients as well because otherwise quality fluids would be a bottleneck. ^^

Anyway, another reason why I feel like they should sit down and rework the quality system from scratch to make it work entirely differently, such that fluids can also have quality. And If a different system would be better than it is currently I wouldn't even mind a second if it entirely bricks all my quality upcycler setups because I would love to see these atrocities gone. I would welcome the day I can drag the deconstruct planner over them.

[meganothing]

While definitely true that what quality means in terms of the game and how quality works is poorly explained in game as well... however this is not even part of the gripes I have with the quality system. xD


Anyway I totally know how it works since I am using it myself. I just feel like it is terrible how it works.

At the very foundation of the things I don't like about it... I personally think it is against the original spirit of the game of making efficient factories. Simply because you intentionally have to repeatedly recycle items every time with a 75% loss. This is the opposite of being efficient. All for a chance to return better quality ingredients, because of how making better quality items in the first place through a natural crafting cascade would be too unreliable & inefficient to produce a steady stream of better quality items. Sure, resources are infinite with SA and even so a lot of the wasteful process can be made up with better quality quality-modules to increase chances or productivity to get more chances for rolls and thereby make up for the loss of items caused by recycling, but it doesn't change that at the core we are still dumping stuff into the trash on purpose because that is the most "efficient" way to battle the gambling machine.

That sums up Gleba very good, i.e. overproduction being the best way to cope with the wasting away of everything, right?.

Space Age had to introduce new ways of production to make the game still interesting. In my opinion players would have largely been bored with a space age where you just had the same game loops as in 1.0 just with more recipes. There are dozens of mods already filling up that space. The spirit of Factorio is "automating everything" and on gleba time is automated, with quality chance is automated. This is very much in the spirit of Factorio

I also dislike the pure idea of returning better quality ingredients from recycling. Imagine if in reality to get a better quality smartphone they would repeatedly disassemble it and by chance it magically results in a better display component or better battery than originally which then are being put back together for a higher quality product. What the hell. How? But apparently in the Factorio universe that is how it works. I sure remember a lot of discussions back in the day similarly about productivity, but at least productivity you can explain by refining a process and thereby either stretching input materials to make more items out of it or overall being less wasteful in the manufacturing process. So productivity has its place. But how recyclers return quality ingredients from a shittier product is...

In reality a smartphone IS made of components of varying quality. For a simple example ICs are usually sorted into different quality bins after production because they are NOT equal. Even in their bins they are different and could be just having minimal specs for the bin or be nearly material for a better bin. Other parts like screws, resistors, capacitors, plastic cases are of different quality as well but don't get sorted for quality because they are cheap and you just need them to fullfill minimum specs.

Even when recycling stuff you can get all sorts of qualities out of a smartphone because of wear and tear, age of components and how well the recycling works. Imagine the process of removing the glass of smartphones of all makes and types being done by an advanced robot and depending on whether the smartphones shape is better suited or worse for holding it steady, so getting the glass off with less or more force applied. Or the quality and age of the glue influencing how well and with more or less damage you can remove the glass.

Mind Blown

Mind blown.gif

Is this how Apple makes their iPhones? According to Factorio it is. ^^

They also said it would be "optional", and sure, no one holds me at gunpoint forcing me to use it. But leaving a potential 2.5x increase in throughput for key production areas on the table or being able to make more space efficient designs (especially with how space platforms are) makes me beg the question...

Is it though

Is it though.gif

Unless you show me that it is impossible to reach outer space with a spaceship with normal components, it is optional. And that is the only place where potentially there is a requirement for space efficient design. Everywhere else it may just be your feeling of missing out on something.

On one hand you say you need to waste so much material to get legendary stuff (i.e. it is so expensive) and here you say the potential 2.5x increase is so valuable to any design. Well, isn't that how it works in the real world as well, very desirable stuff is rare and therefore expensive? Juwels, designer clothes, top-of-the-line computers,... And isn't that exactly how game balance works? The best stuff is the hardest to get?

I also dislike that to be able to do quality reliable so you can do a more "tall" playstyle you actually need to go "wide" to be able to afford to dump the resources into it in the first place, so while it looked like they wanted to address the concern some people raised back then who wanted to do more efficient & compact factories rather than huge megabases, it still ended up a feature that actually favors big base players over people who make little factories simply because of the amount of resources you need to throw at the blender.


And then there is this... Every time I read the meta talks on forum, reddit or elsewhere about which item <x> is best to dump into the recycler repeatedly so you can get quality ingredients back to be used for product <y> you actually want, I roll my eyes because this is what Factorio now boils down to. We used to talk about various optimal setups to make various items, not which way is the best to trash items. I feel it is anti-factorio-esque to the point it grinds the teeth off of the gearwheel in the Factorio logo. ^^

Anyway then there are people who eventually find shortcuts like with LDS shuffle or asteroid recycling because they have good return rates. I cannot blame them, because the system is terrible, so from my perspective they are right if they fight poison with poison.


So overall, I feel there are several things that are conceptually busted about how quality works. That is my opinion about it after 9 months.

I will continue to use it, simply because it is there and I paid for it, and because in principle, as I said previously, I like the idea of quality items even though I wish the process to get them was different. But even though I will try to make the most out of it how it is currently I will sure not grow to like the mechanic as it is because I cannot shut my eyes and pretend I would.

[Shirasik]

Long story short game has no explanation what quality is. Let's say we took one common iron plate and one legendary iron plate. How they differ? What properties do they have that differ enough to make a conclusion what one plate is common and another is legendary? How exactly can we compare them?

I don't know how it happened, but I know what quality is about. I had my difficulties to start implementing it, but what quality is about in general was never an issue for me. There was nobody I asked, I just got enough information on it own. So in my opinion, there is enough information around. If you keep your eyes open, it will find you.

How it is available in the game can be clearly seen by exploring the recipe selection dialog of any production machine and choose a recipe with higher than normal quality. Doing this will immediately show that you need quality ingredients, and the question that immediately comes up is how to get these quality ingredients, which will explain why the game offered you quality modules for research, because this is the mechanism to create quality items from non quality items.
How quality items differ from non quality items is visualized in Factoriopedia (the light blue dot behind the stats).

And that's all you need to know about quality. Everything beyond that is how to build production lines to actually craft quality items, but that's the usual engineering task that's the core of Factorio.

Seems like you described whole gameplay as "follow instructions and shut up" approach. That's a code for footman soldiers not engineers. Are we soldiers in this game? No.

At the very foundation of the things I don't like about it... I personally think it is against the original spirit of the game of making efficient factories. Simply because you intentionally have to repeatedly recycle items every time with a 75% loss. This is the opposite of being efficient. All for a chance to return better quality ingredients, because of how making better quality items in the first place through a natural crafting cascade would be too unreliable & inefficient to produce a steady stream of better quality items. Sure, resources are infinite with SA and even so a lot of the wasteful process can be made up with better quality quality-modules to increase chances or productivity to get more chances for rolls and thereby make up for the loss of items caused by recycling, but it doesn't change that at the core we are still dumping stuff into the trash on purpose because that is the most "efficient" way to battle the gambling machine.

Nope. You don't have to use recyclers. Designs letting streamlined production of top-available-quality items are available before reaching space and don't require combinators. The problem is, such designs are expansive spaghetti monsters, very UPS unfriendly and having over 80% of machinery standing still waiting for its production to be demanded. On the bright side whole system just works (slowly) stockpiling whatever you decided to.

Well.. for some stuff like legendary wood there is no other option than quality recycling. But I doubt you need mass production of legendary small electric poles and shotguns.

[aka13]

They would be absolutely viable, if you could void higher quality items in lower tier recipes, otherwise they are not manageable, imo.