We've seen that the funny haha break the game +250 water quality actually brought a lot of people back to playing. Realistically, as the world progresses quality gain slows down to a crawl and players get bored. Why don't we take advantage of this unintended experiment to add to the game?
With ancestral worship, players gain access to a special prayer that requires offerings at an altar. To prevent this from being abused too easily, we make it so offerings are tied to village idols. That way for balancing purposes there can be diminishing returns or timegate limits. Obviously not perfect, dummy villages have existed for a long time, but it's less abusive than simply pumping out fresh alts to generate xp for a realm type idea.
There are multiple types of offerings. each offering corresponds to a type of resource in the world. Forageables & Plants (includes wild trees, and boosting crop quality caps), Natural resources (water, clay, soil etc), Huntable Creatures, Mineable resources & Monsters. Each spring the total sum of the offerings in each category for the entire world are calculated, and pushes the base quality of everything up in that category.
The increase in quality should be notable, I'm talking +100 being possible in the late game. Because these offerings would impact all of the systems, you wouldn't have something like Q1000 seals that no one has a cutting tool to take advantage of. It also gives the players cooperative goals to aim towards, as opposed to deepworld quality gain being solely in the hands of factions.
What exactly the offerings should be though I'm not sure, or how quality could play into it. Really only a concept I'm curious if people think might be nice, it would certainly shake up the world as time progresses and give new life to an otherwise very stale endgame.