I’m making some assumptions, but I think as you increase the general quality level of your production lines that it becomes easier (not easy), to get the higher quality items. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think they stated what a higher quality intermediate product does (like a higher quality iron plate). My assumption is that anything produced with it has a boost to it’s quality.

If this is true, then by thoughtfully focusing on where quality is being produced and how high quality items are being used that it should be possible to get reasonable chances at “epic” items.

My point about scaling was that once you have a large supply of epic mining drills, assemblers, labs, etc that it will be possible to achieve the same SPM with fewer machines operating, and therefore could build a higher SPM factory to achieve the same UPS as without quality. You’re probably right that it will take awhile to get sufficient number of epic items to do this, but playtime for this game have never been small numbers.