Why add the Quality Forge/Crusher/Biochamber that upgrade quality without having to use recycling loops?

I find recycling loops sort of boring but also frustrating to balance. They end up taking a large portion of the base and they don't really add much (IMO) in terms of complexity or gameplay. My buildings don't add complexity either, but they make the process more straightforward which I think matches the Factorio way - you have inputs, you have outputs, and you just need more inputs to get the needed outputs.

I also dislike how some items are harder to get higher qualities of - iron plates are easy enough to upgrade from common to legendary (at a roughly 1.5 to 1 ratio, so pretty good), while biter eggs are more difficult, and the ratio is something like 20 to 1. These buildings smooth that out a bit by just letting you upgrade quality directly. I only allowed base resources to be upgraded as well, because the idea is you setup the rest of the factory to use higher quality resources, so if you want higher quality blue chips, you upgrade the iron ore, copper ore, and coal to produce the needed materials to craft a legendary blue chip.

The normal recycling method is still allowed and possible, it just doesn't have to be the only solution.

Why disable quality jumps?

Mostly because, like recycling, I dislike the randomness of it. If you are upgrading something using a recycling loop, you have that small chance for higher qualities, so now you have to deal with it. Since you can't mix and match ingredient qualities, if you get a legendary iron plate recycling green chips, but only get uncommon/rare/epic everything else, you now have some iron plates that you can't use. I find the experience more frustrating than fun, so I turned it off.

Why change recycling to always return full amounts?

One thing I like about Factorio is its predictability. You know if you need x items, you need y inputs to produce them. With recycling this gets a bit messy because of the small randomness you get - if you recycle 100 iron plates, you might get 25 iron plates back, or you might only get 20. Or you might get 30. I found that I was constantly doing "void recycling" to handle resources that would randomly return more items which would throw off the balance. Without the randomness, you can guarantee that if you recycle x items, you will get y back.

Why 300 scrap and a recycling time of 60 seconds?

That was the lowest amount (for both the number of scrap needed and the time) to make an even number of all the outputs. The general idea is if you recycled 300 scrap, it would take 60 seconds to do so (at crafting speed 1), and it would ROUGHLY return the same output as what my recipe now does. The only real difference is that it's no longer random.