Definitely worth using better quality filament! You paid a good bit of money for the machine, don’t start being tight when it comes to filament, or you will get to spend even more fixing issues that the poor quality filament causes… When you consider near 100% success rate with a higher quality filament vs something as low as 70% with cheap stuff, you will probably save money pretty fast.
I consider “Das Filament” Filament to be very good quality, quite sturdy for PLA from my experience. I wasn’t pleased with the Verbatim brand black PLA i got initially.
As most of the guys are saying, your Nozzle temperature is a bit on the high side, if your using a standard brass nozzle you should be at about 200-205’C if your using a Ruby Nozzle, add about 5’C.
slow the print speed down a little, 40-45mm/s.
it also looks like you are using the std fan duct, as you have uneven cooling on the two sides, noticeable about the ears and the eyes, several of us have designed improved ducts that improve the cooling fan flow balancing it to both sides, check them out on YouMagine and give them a try. This should help with the uneven cooling, although as some are very effective you will need to reduce the fan speed a little, ?
The top loop is a cooling problem, too much heat and dwell time can cause problems, but yours isn’t too bad, I’ve see worse.
you could always create a small file to play with the top and the loop that only takes 5 minutes to print and then play with the settings as swordriff mentioned.
My experience is completely different about Cura vs. Simplify 3D quality of prints. Probably because you always need to make perfect fit settings to object
What I’ve found is that Cura oftentimes simply ignores some surface details when it reads an .stl file. That is my biggest gripe with the software. For ease of use, sure it’s good, but it tends to get hung when manipulating large objects, as it tries to constantly slice rather than allow one to change the object orientation and adjust all your supports etc and only then slice the final piece.
We would recommend turning off coasting and also turning off wipe at end.
lower your retraction speed to around 1600. But first turn off retraction and then keep testing and turning your retraction up by 0.02 until you get it right - this is linked closely with the extruder temperature you should be able to find the ratio between them it just takes time. There is also a setting that says avoid outline, set this up so you minimise how often the print head needs to cross the outline.