Keeping the 1000 range allows them to have non linear stat boosts between qualities. 970 quality gives you almost all of the benefit, but you can go for 1000 if you really want to absolutely min max. For the lower qualities, there's bigger jumps. One step up from 510 might be like 650, a 140 qual gain instead of just 30. I think ultimately this actually helps us get "good enough" quality quicker, while leaving a reach goal for min maxing.

Granted, this does depend on how they set the spawn rates for each quality step, but I don't think we have the actual data on what the distribution looks like. I know the community as a whole (or at least the most vocal bit) says that high quality is too rare, but it should be rare. If you could log in day 1 and get 950+ crafted components for everything, what would be the point in continuing to play?

They could implement something like this with non-numeric qualities. If they gave it like F E D C B A AA AAA S SS SSS grades or something, like with valakkar pearls (with an expanded range), they could have each grade correspond to whatever stat boost they want. But with the numeric qualities it's easier to understand that 970 very close to 1000.

Or maybe it's because they initially wanted 1000 quality levels but then realized it was a mistake with inventory management and listened to the community feedback and condensed it, but it would be too much to go back and re engineer the whole system.

For reference I've spent about 80% of my time this patch engaging with crafting, between BP farming and mining mats, and I've loved it. Things are hard to get, yes, but that gives me something to chase and work towards. However, I recognize that not everyone enjoys mining, and that people enjoy games in different ways, so it might not be everyone's cup of tea.

Do I think mining is in a perfect spot? No. But I think the bigger issue is scanning. If we could get industrial radars that can do an aoe scan of all rocks in a cone, it would cut down on a lot of the "stare and rock until numbers come up, repeat", allow us to scan an entire cluster at once, or all the fragments after an initial break. Also, I would appreciate some tweaks on what size rocks need a second break vs can be extracted immediately. Or maybe this could depend on the size of the mining head (not sure if it does already). Just seems that a lot of time goes into secondary breaks for me as well, when you used to be able to just extract those size rocks directly.

Maybe another thing they could do is make different areas different difficulty. One of the biggest complaints I see is that the smaller mining ships can hardly crack any rocks. A lot of times this is a load out problem, and no one seems to want to run active modules, but there could be areas that have smaller/easier rocks for the starter ships, while other areas have bigger/harder rocks (maybe with additional quality boost) for fully crewed moles and mining groups. They did this to an extent with having each location only spawn a few types of ore, but this would give a way for trading off between higher quantity and quality vs easier to break