Currently, the quest reward for Probe Microfactories do not infact cause all probes on any ship to cooldown immediately (as the tooltip would have you believe, stating "-100% Probe Cooldown).

I have seen the error in many playthroughs in many games, easy as pie to replicate, make a ship with probes, stick microfactory on, fire off all your probes, behold as only 2 probes return to the ship's probe stock (regardless of probes used).

That is literally worthless as just having two probe modules does exactly the same thing.

I will test this more thoroughly but I am pretty sure that it is again, literally worse in every way than just a regular ol' probe module. I've never seen it do anything to titanium probes, and with hyperium it gives you 2 probes a turn iirc.

The modules cost the same (basic/improved probes and probe microfactory), and your argument doesn't make any sense here, since your ship will have 4 probes with 2 turn cd per probe (works out to 1 probe a turn), OR 2 probes at 1 turn cd per probe (also works out to 1 probe a turn). The second option is in no way superior as probes per turn is the same but your probe capacity is lower.

An aside: but thise quest can also give you the ramscoop which is massively better given the current state of fleet/ship mobility (+25% move per MP is nothing to scoff at! AND IT STACKS!)

Testing concluded:

You are correct about the function of the probe microfactory.

I stand by my opinion that it's a dumb module and a pointless quest reward. 

It only has any positive effect when paired with hyperium probes, and even then, still pretty meh, and two hyperium probe modules vastly outperform it.

When paired with normal probes it has 0 advantages over just having two probe modules.

When paired with titanium probes it is worse than running 2x titanium probe modules.

Results: It sucks. There's no worthwhile point to this thing. Need buff.

Have to agree. Module is irrelevant and quite inferior to engine reward.

I don't know if the game is still being balanced via patches, but this is still an almost worthless quest item in the current build. It has some extremely minor value, in that you can get half cooldown on more expensive probe modules like hyperium, etc.