Mod author here. I don't think anyone uses the quality downgrade feature, so I'm thinking of removing it.

Please let me know if that's a feature you would like to keep?

I think that a funny option, same spirit than https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Inverted-Quality?from=search.

But this should be coupled with a mod that can automatically detect it can upgrade an entity with better quality.

How about an both way system?
Like if entity is working - it can upgrade. If not - it can downgrade.
Or vice versa.
No logic here - pure usefulness for the player.

Dunno, on the one hand I want to balance free upgrades with some downsides, but on the other I don't want to check every planet and reupgrade stuff. Because I will have more than 10 of them conquared soon in my playthrough x)

My final suggestion is - just keep the feature. There is a mod with reverse qualities and generally some people like to face challenges.

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm thinking of introducing difficulty that correspond to quality levels. Here's the general idea:

Common - current cheaty version of the mod
Uncommon - non-cheat version: entities are marked for upgrade based on usage if the item exists in the logistic network
Rare - research is required to unlock marking entities for upgrade, could require a building that monitors the logistic network to apply upgrades for the player, may include progressive research for various settings (luck accumulation, etc)
Epic - buildings have small chance to degrade quality, adds research to mitigate degradation chance
Legendary - degradation over time regardless of usage, includes damage at lowest qualities, need to continually produce infrastructure to replace the breakage

That look like a big project lol.

Random idea:

A maintenance cost. If the building upgrade. It's would "broke" until fixing that will upgrade it's quality at the end. This way we could simulate the "cost" in rss of having quality upgrade. And the more the building is in quality level the more it's require normal item to be fixed.

For example, normal would require 10 item to fix, uncommon would require 100 normal item, rare 1000, epic 10000 (lol). You would have robot to fix the entity increasing the counter until the building is fixed upgrading it's quality.