Depends on what you want and how fast... if you want to be able to mine HQ sooner, get HQ gear sooner.

If you like melding and don't want to worry about caps until 4.0, get HQ gear and meld it, and keep it. It's fine.
If you hate melding, all red scrip gear is fine to get everything currently. On the way to that goal, the blue scrip gear is fine, even, so I assume NQ gear is even better.

So all in all it just depends if you're willing to meld a bunch or not. I suggest if you DO want to meld then just save for HQ gear to begin with, don't bother with melding NQ gear.