Hey I just had a wacky ass idea I had to crawl out of bed to post about, what if ore quality influenced smelting productivity to further reward high ql ore, and then increase the baseline qualities of layer 5 because apparently the ore ql doesn't really matter that much in the end when spiraling exists?
That would also make layer 5 gold better than layer 4 gold etc so I'd be more excited if i had ql 140 schrifterz instead of "Wow, what a waste."