People were identifying gross features (like the convection cells in the first website I linked), and giving those features names. Like “sunspots”, “faculae”, “pores”, “granulation”, “bright points”, etc. That’s on the observational side.

I’m less informed about simulations in this era - perhaps some simplified MHD simulations had been more quantitative in linking equations of state to the emergence of these features - but I believe they were not realistic enough to provide definite constraints on the scale of the structures.

It was clear that these features had to do with energy transport and some of the mechanisms were hypothesized. But the spatial scale of the gross energy transfer in these convective cells was not known, either through simulations or observation.

"Qualitative" means that the field had good conceptual theories, but didn't have sufficient observational and computational resolution to determine the detailed numerical values

quality vs quantity

seeing something new vs observing same stuff many many times to do statistics