Thanks a million for the illuminating response.  It all makes sense now.  The big take-aways for me are:

1) ‘quantization off’ does not/will not result in ‘chromatic harmonizing’.  ie, the key/scales are ‘always on’.  And

2) this…

tbskoglund wrote:

… quantizes this note to the next scale degree…

(emphasis mine)

…which explains why the algo will sometimes produce 2nds when ‘pitch=3rd’ is selected, 3rds when ‘pitch=4th’ is selected, etc.

I’ll make another pitch here for user editable and/or custom scale options in H90 (and/or RNBO in H90)…  Eventide’s top shelf pitch tracking combined with the ability to drop a Scala file onto a ‘scale’ param knob in Control (or via gen~) and let the non-western & microtonal fun begin. 🙂

Thanks again.