rich dust from the green+blue dust recipe makes more unicomp than was used to make green+blue ore right now with the toolhead recipe, and since every step in the process of turning unicomp into fine dust and then pressing it back into unicomp technically makes -slightly- more unicomp, this can be exploited easily to circumvent the quality recycling process entirely

in essence, once you have any amount of high quality Unicomp, you can use it to make more identical high-quality unicomp without any material downsides besides an overhead of perhaps eight or twelve machines, and since unicomp can be made into most vanilla recipes trivially, this makes it possible to entirely bypass recycling for most vanilla and yuoki recipes

I personally think this is really cool, but, it could be nipped in the bud if you want by just adjusting the form press unicomp recipe to require 24 or 25 instead of 20 fine dust. This means it's still technically possible to reproduce unicomp in a loop to retain its quality, but you can't easily get free high quality material out of the process.

afaik that means someone could still just use productivity modules to achieve the same effect, so maybe something more specific might be necessary, like being unable to form press dust at high quality, or the recipe outputting liquid unicomp which has no intrinsic quality

Given that in vanilla SA you can get large quantities of high quality materials without recycling just by interconverting asteroid chunks, and there are infinite resources from space, Vulcanus and Gleba, having the unicomp loop is hardly a deal breaker. Youki has always had it as a small scale source of infinite resources but setting it up does take a considerable capital investment, especially early game. As the quality loop needs significant amounts of quality toolheads to scale, it feels more like a reward for hard work. From past experience to make enough spare unicomp to supply 4 blue belts of plate (factoring in productivity during washing and smelting) requires 140 toolheads between 20 crushers and enough pellet presses to make prenuclear power generation struggle. Since Youki has other loops for resource generation (like the stone dust and oil refining) there would be nothing stopping players from generating quality though sheer FPS intensive scaling.

I suggest the loop is left as is.

yeah the problem basically is just that the resources can be maximum quality without the proportionate expected input cost of attaining that quality, and once you have it, you can use that quality to make its own toolheads and unicomp, leaving you permanently at that quality within the loop.

that's really the only grievance, the overlap of dust -> unicomp volume is enough to enable blueprinted matter generators that print out legendary unicomp at a slow pace with no input whatsoever, and the proportion of unicomp that would actually be required to make it outside the loop is drastically out of scale, by many orders of magnitude, meaning these generator blueprints would be making hundreds of times their weight in gold

once you've built one of these, you suddenly have a strong incentive to stop mining basic ores entirely, you can just build up from legendary unicomp, and if you don't have enough, print out another matter module using the legendary unicomp you already made

even if you don't go crazy, this still trivializes building legendary versions of all yuoki and vanilla machines

like with any other balance changes I assume if it removes an effective game cheat there'd be a checkmark option in mod settings to enable it if you specifically want it, like universal productivity, and in this case it'd be trivial (a change of the input requirements for unicomp pressing from 20 to 24-26 dust, whatever is needed to keep it comfortably above yuoki's own productivity modules)
me personally secretly I think it's fine and wouldn't want it gone either, but usually this kind of problem only ever occurs when you run multiple overhaul mods at once that both employ a vanilla material in a processing loop, and with quality suddenly this is actually a more serious problem. my strategy has always just been pretending it doesn't exist, but if it can be gone, I would like a way to turn it off

So just like regular SA once you have an asteroid harvester dumping legendary stuff. Or hit level 13 of the technology for LDS and processing unit productivity. With that you literally only mine for legendary uranium, tungsten and holmium.

sort of, but several times more drastically absurd in scale, and something you can do as soon as you get plastic

This is a very, very old positive-feedback loop that's existed in YI for as long as I can remember. Quality just makes it stand out more because quality unicomp can be expanded at the cost of energy, and unicomp can be - for the most part - freely converted to or from equivalent-quality Nauvis resources.

It's also nearly the only way to meaningfully inject quality into YI since the vast majority of machines, including the fast-assemblers, do not accept quality modules.

Such things being achievable early are not exactly beyond expectation, because YI deliberately does not tech-gate anything. The gating factor is crafting complexity, including the endless rain of byproducts, rather than "normal" gates like burning X science packs, or "trigger" gates like obtaining X of any given resource.

If it helps, this only gets you Nauvis resources, and not anything unique to the SA planets.