In Unleashed, I take the relative scarcity of Certus Quartz to be Algorithm's way of preventing power-building a huge ME system in the early-to-mid-game, similar to how TC requires the rare-in-the-early-game Aluminum for the highest-tiered, non-Nether metal. A full ME system with a 5x5x5 or larger crafting computer filled with recipes should be an end-game build, not a mid-game build. Limiting Certus also makes long ME cable runs that much more expensive and encourages the use of Quantum Gates (vs. long ME cable runs).
In my previous game, I reached the late-to-end state in a matter of 2 to 3 weeks, but that was only possible by EE3'ing up Ender Pearls (4 iron) and Diamonds (gold). It was fun at first, yes, but I cheated myself out of several weeks of going through other tiers and trying other content. By the time I got around to other mods I wanted to play with, they were trivial since I was drowning in energy and resources and could instantly conjure up anything my ME system was taught to build, ex. a 64-stack of Tesseract Frames in a matter of seconds and a filled stack of 64 in minutes.
This time, I'm not using EE3 at all, taking it slower, and having more fun. Ender Pearls, Diamonds, and Certus are as rare as they should be.
While I can't disagree more with some mod authors' techniques to tiered progression *cough* GT *cough*, I do agree that using shortcuts decreases the lifetime of a world.