"My understanding was that this device will actually upgrade the quality of the signal"

You misunderstood.

"...you would gain *some* improvement on your current setup from converting component to RGB,"

No you wouldn't. As i've said, RGB is the originating format, it is wideband, high quality. Component is bandwidth limited and matrixed...it's a form of analog compression. Converting a lower quality source to RGB will not improve anything.