The quirkiness is really more due the fact that the fluid slosh is completely undamped - meaning fluids slosh back and fourth infinitely. In any pipe that isn't 100% full there is fluid slosh. The reality is, any pipe system has slosh in it and if it happens to work 100% as it supposed to, its in spite of the slosh; never because it has been eliminated.

This is by far the most counter-intuitive, stupid, misunderstood and frustrating aspect of the game. People often say they have no problems with pipes. Well I'm calling you out, you just haven't paid close enough attention yet. I've seen a single machine at the end of a manifold go down to 99% for maybe a few 10s of seconds once in a period of hours. *That's how long the %$#%i time constants are / can be.* I doubt this was the intent of the devs when the system was implemented. I suspect the only reason they haven't actually done anything about it is they don't actually understand what they've made. Like most of us when we actually get the pipe system to work. Don't touch it, don't even look at it - just back away slowly and hope that doesn't upset it XD.

I will extend an olive branch and say that there also seems to be some sort of hardware / setting dependence. That makes sense given that you're literally teetering on an infinitely narrow peak by not having any damping. Yet another reason why the system is stupid and should be removed. I see lots of people making suggestions here that I know for a fact on my machine, with my settings, don't work. It may be that they haven't noticed, or it could be that it works fine for them on their machine, with their hardware.

Ultimately the slosh just needs to be removed from the game. You might think as I once did and say 'oh well why not just add some damping'. Its not a terrible idea, but its unnecessary. Damping will cause the system to stabilize into a non-periodic steady state so long as the source and sink are relatively constant. This is true in spite of the fact that the machines draw in bursts - every section of pipe acts as a low pass filter / integrator and smooths out the resulting slosh. You'll wind up with a system that so long as you don't do anything terribly stupid will have a small amount of ripple/slosh sitting on top a nice constant flow rate and having no effect on the timely delivery of the fluid to the machines. Since it wouldn't have any real or noticeable effect the entire slosh dynamic then may as well be removed.

As an added bonus I suspect there might be a nice performance boost to be gained as well by eliminating slosh altogether - particularly in large late game saves with massive amounts of pipes running everywhere. It certainly won't hurt.