OK so the thing to understand with Quartz is this: If Snow had to fly there to place a cube, then there will be no quartz there as the chunk was already generated in the pack. Most directions have a cube in that direction which means that a lot of the map is pregenerated unfortunately. West is the direction with the shortest distance to un-generated chunks. The other directions have up to 2500 blocks that would already be generated.
Here's my view from -675, 79, 195
If you want a visual representation of what chunks have already been generated (and therefore cannot have quartz in it) then you can use the auto-map feature of JourneyMap to fill out all of the generated chunks on the map. Areas which aren't mapped aren't generated. The pre-generated area is almost a square area with corners:
X, Z
1348,1266
-1761,-1167
If you're outside that, the fixed ore generation will be in effect.
Otherwise you'll have to wait for the new map in 1.2 I'm afraid.
As far as shiny goes, I think it's meant to be super rare. I don't think you need it for much anyway. You can get it as a 100% secondary drop from smelting ferrous in an induction smelter with cinnabar (the TE material, not the Thaumcraft stuff) if you're not finding much in the ground.