Strange, I had predictable results all along but this week it's turned into a lottery. I see your frustration now, and can only conclude that over working a designer on many projects affects the research values. There's no other reason for it to drop, it never did before and my only difference is three extra projects.
I think there is definitely strong degradation of research with time. Short time. If you don't keep the values up and invest staff, they drop on their own.
But we still don't know why we need to keep them up, what is their use in the calcs?
i find it rises to unsure pretty quickly - within a few days but then takes considerably longer to go higher. - i have yet to go higher than good - so that must be my teams max
I saw my research levels rise to good some weeks ago. Now they all have dropped to okay (without any development), even the ones that I'm researching right now. There is no logic in this that I can understand. Is it relative to the best in the game or something?