Hey,

One alternate way I'd enjoy unlocking quality would be if it was planet agnostic.

My preferred way to go about it would be like this. On nauvis you unlock your basic quality modules, and max uncommon quality (still through regular research).
Vulcanus, Fulgora and Gleba each have a science-pack specific research that increases max quality level by +1 (a bonus akin to robot follower count). The order does not matter. After your first expansion planet, you can get rare quality, after your second you can get epic and after your third you can get legendary.
That would open up legendary quality before Aquilo.

If that is not possible, I'll most certainly use the mod as-is for a second playthrough. Perhaps, as a minor change, I'd appreciate if quality modules do not auto-unlock on game start, but are still a normal research, but it unlocks all quality tiers along with it. Perhaps a toggle in the mod settings?

All of your suggestions are possible to implement and not hard to do.

However, this is entirely out-of-scope - I just wanted to have access to everything as soon as the game starts to make my n+1th playthrough a bit less of a slog.

I do appreciate the feedback and I might take a deeper look into this at a later date.

Thank you for the reply! I totally understand if this is out of scope, no worries at all and thank you for considering the ideas at all.

Thank you for your mod as is. I'm just done with my first playthrough and will be using this for my next playthrough.

Cheers!