Quality by default should be epic unlocks with red/green/blue/space science, and legendary unlocks with the recipe that's currently used for epic.
There should be a toggleable option at the start of a new game for "faster quality" in the way there used to be an option to turn the research queue on that makes epic a red/green/blue recipe and legendary red/green/blue/purple/space, with a burner recycler recipe that's unlocked at blue science.

I fucking love the idea of quality but "cool shit that would be fun to do throughout the game which is gated by the devs until you've already beaten 95% of the game already" is a massive pet peeve of mine. Is there any good mod fix that unlocks quality earlier?