Havn't tried yet, but I truly appreciate the thought of quality being engineered opposed to be luck based. I appreciated the thought you put in this mod, it feels a bit weird though, that fabriactor is availble so soon, even before quality modules. Perhaps some other negative effects of making quality items/intermediates could occur:

• Production scrap, which needs to delt with, perhaps some Scap/Ash (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/atan-ash) (for 1.1 and IR3, there was this beautiful mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ProductionScrapForIR3)
• High energy use
• Cooling requirements? Water as low tech, but later on fluorketon?
• Low crafting speed
• Lubricant usage
• Relevant Science pack usage.
• Large amount of pollution or gas which we need to dispose use a flare stack?
• Larger foot print for the Quality plant, especially in the early game this adds additional challegenge as your defenses against the biters are not optimal yet. (perhaps this one could be used: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/AdvancedAssemblyMachineStandalone , on of the beautiful designs from huricane: https://www.figma.com/proto/y1IQG08ZG2jIeJ5sTyF4MP )

For some reason i really dislike the idea of upcycling, therefore perhaps the following mod would also play well with your mod:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/No-Qualitycycling

Hm... adding a rare resource to all quality crafting recipes instead of increasing the cost of existing recipes is a very interesting idea but I think it should be done in a seperate mod.

Consider this:
- There are small patches of ores found on all planet: Rare Minerals.
- These rare minerals are needed to craft "Precision Parts".
- The Fabricator has +100% Quality from the get go, but all recipes cost one additional "Precision Parts".
- The Rare Minerals patches are tiny and even rarer than Uranium. So you have to really think about what production chains you want to use them for.
- Precision crafting is possible in the early game, but you probably won't have any Rare Minerals patches you can mine from. You only have a very limited supply from mining rocks.
- In the super late game, Promethium Asteroids could be crushed into Rare Minerals.
- Quality modules don't exist anymore.
- Recycling could maybe be retooled that they can recover the valuable high quality parts more reliably. Maybe a variant of the recycler that can only dismantle finished products but at 90% efficiency (instead of 25%) and without being affected by Speed, Quality or Productivity. Since finished products aren't affected by Productivity anyway this should not be exploitable.

Love that <3

The really late game part is already kinda realized:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/promethium-quality