Quality was ALREADY built into mining.. please drop the Qualities stuff..

I think CIG has made a big mistake adding quality to mining.

It already was inherently part of the mining process and adding it to the ore has just created too many factors that need consideration and overcomplicate the game.

I understand "Quality" affects the stats of weapons/components stats and stuff but honestly I don't think that's a healthy change for the game and especially in the age of "bricked components" it makes a lot of gatekeeping.. I think EVERYTHING that can be crafted or purchased should come in 3 flavors (like flight blades):
All components have their stats considered, we'll just call them X and Y to generalizse things)
A) This option has a better X but a worse Y than the standard

B) This option has a better Y but worse X than the standard

c) This option (store purchasable) has a Balanced X and Y (better than the worse stat of option A or B but worse than the better stat of A or B).

Then we aren't gate keeping the "meta" behind all this ore quality stuff..

Second.. Ore quality was already factored into mining pre these changes. When you refine something you take something of a lesser quality and make it better.. This is the whole reason we have refineries.. The very definition of a refinery is "an industrial installation where a substance is refined." And Refined means, "Raw materials processed to remove unwanted elements, dross, or impurities"

So we shouldn't HAVE different qualities of materials.. We are refining the material to remove the unwanted elements to make something more pure.. The idea of tiers of quality is dumb.

PLUS it's already built into the mining gameplay at it's core..

For example.. Lets take gold.. We go out looking for asteroids/rocks and we're floating around for hours pining away looking for good rocks.

We find two rocks near each other and lets assume they have the same mass and sucking the rock up produces the same amount of overall SCU material stored on your ship and therefore same refining cost:

Rock 1) 10% gold 20% Whatever material 15% whatever other material 55% inert material
Rock 2) 45% gold 5% whatever material 20% whatever other material 30% inert material

Rock 2 is already a higher quality rock.. Both rocks will produce pure gold after refining but one of them is substantially better thanks to the make up of materials that will be separated in the refining process..

Now if the market swings and gold becomes worth it there is a case where rock 1 is worth mining also, but for crafting and stuff it's probably more worthwhile to go after rock 2 vs rock 1.

After refining rock 1 and Rock 2, Rock 1 will still produce pure gold post refinement, but that gold has a higher cost thanks to refinement cost where as rock 2 will have a better gold/cost.. So quality already has an affect in the game.

So outside of gatekeeping the meta (which is worse now that bricked parts are a thing and we can't salvage other player's ships to make our own better) what's really the point of material quality? It doesn't make any kind of sense and all it does is overcomplicate this game and it's going to just get WORSE when base building exists..