Good to know. I won't worry so much about extruder upgrade then.

UPDATE:

I believe I have solved this issue. It looks like it was a combination of software and hardware. It seems to have been directly related to acceleration and jerk settings as well as good bed leveling.

I started by removing the zip tie holding the wires down to the hotend as well as changing the orientation of the parts. I was still seeing the issue on one part more than the others. After watching closely I realized that using simplify3d my priming line up front primes the extruder then at the end of the line moves another 10-20mm or so VERY slowly with no extrusion. I don't know if this is a retraction setting, a wipe setting, or what. Having come up short there I solved this issue by printing a 3 line skirt around my parts.

What was happening was that last movement on the priming line was doing something to take pressure out of the extruder (please help me if you know what is causing this slow movement with no extrusion). The first part wouldn't get but a little bit of filament laid down. Basically was a layer skip that caused the rest of that middle part to look crappy. After adding the skirt I was getting solid application and a solid part.

After doing that I still saw some really ugly parts. I went down to two parts and both were coming out pretty gnarly but at least they looked the same. It was basically "ringing" that I was getting. It just looked way worse on that part with the missed layer.

Since Simplify3d does not have acceleration and jerk settings and I could only find an Mcode script for acceleration but NOT jerk settings I did some further research and loaded up ReplicatorG. I connected ReplicatorG to my QIDI Tech 1 and looked at the acceleration settings (had to learn to open the makerware program and turn off background service so that RepG could connect). I changed them to the recommend 800/8 and wrote those setting changes to my printer.

After doing those things (some small changes but mostly adding a skirt, a fresh bed level, and changing accel/jerk settings) I'm watching a fresh set of 2 print and they're looking better than ever. However, I'm going ALL the way back to looking at retraction settings now because the only noticeable issues are falling in line with where S3D is showing the retractions. I'm going to start by turning off retraction and then move on to negative priming after retraction.

Once again if anyone knows what that movement is at the end of my priming line please tell me. Wipe and coast are not turned on but in the advanced tab there are some options ticked such as wiping for outside perimeters. Those shouldn't do anything if wiping is turned off though I would think