GORFs do NOT increase morale. They can however hurt morale if you research it and don't have one active. Same thing for rec centers and forums too actually. This makes rec centers quite useless. They should be the absolute last thing you research in any game, aside from some very specific circumstances which should never occur in practice. DIRTs also don't do anything for morale. They are to reduce damage done to buildings. There may be some morale penalty if you research them and don't have enough, but they will not increase morale over where you were before researching and building them. It's like this for any morale issue regarding colony state. If you don't research it, you get to bury you head in the sand and ignore it (for morale reasons at least).
Basically, if it doesn't show up on your morale list (Ctrl+M), then it won't affect morale. Only worry about what that list tells you to worry about.
Here's how those things work. Suppose for arguments sake that the number of things you have researched gives you 10 base morale points, and you want to research say rec centers, which can give a bonus of 2 points. Assuming you keep things under control, your morale before researching could be 10/10 = 100%. Immediately after researching it will be 10/12 = 83%. After you've built the rec centers to account for demand, you base morale will then be 12/12 = 100%. You're no better off. In fact, you were slightly worse off during the period between when you researched the tech, and got enough buildings up to account for demand. This is why I say research rec centers dead last. They're only purpose is to help morale, and as you can see, they don't help.
The only possible use for rec centers, is if there is some colony state you are unable to manage. Let's say you have buildings disabled due to the blight, and you are now unable to take them offline or disabled/destroy them. Then maybe your base morale would have been 8/10 = 80%, and after researching and building rec centers, it's now 10/12 = 83%. That is, rec centers can make other problems account for a smaller piece of the pie. In this case, and pretty much only in this case can they be truely beneficial. For any other morale issue, there are usually other ways to solve them that are more effective, and more permanent.
If you have unemployed workers, you might build a ton of vehicle factories, just to keep people employed. You don't have to build anything at those factories, just keeping them online will make people happy. If you need more of a building, then build more. If you have too many scientists as workers, then stop training scientists, and try and move them to research. This might take some time, but if you have scientists working as workers, then you have a worker shortage anyways, and adding the burden of running rec centers won't be helping you there. If you've completed all research, and have excess scientists, then build more med centers, or other buildings that require scientists (or just don't worry about it, because you probably already have a large population and don't need to worry much about new people).
Now, GORFs at least let you recycle things, but I find I have very little use for this. Maybe if a disaster destroys a building, I could pick that stuff up, but I find just using those cargo trucks at a mine, and workers at a smelter gives you more ore, and it's more stable. The GORF only helps you periodically, and requires staffing full time once researched to avoid the morale penalty. The best I can say for the GORF, is that once you've researched it, you are then able to research more tech that can increase ore production. However, I think of this as the later tech being beneficial, while the GORF tech that leads there is slightly detrimental. Hence, I tend to avoid researching GROF until later in the game when I have the extra workers, and need a bit more ore.
Similarly, if there isn't too much fear of disasters, or attack, I find DIRTs are also a waste of resources.
Med Centers will help population growth. They are 2 fold once you research them. Once they're researched, they have a morale effect, and you must keep demand at or below 100% to keep your morale up. They also slow your death rate, which is proportional to your population, and inversely proportional to your morale. The more Med Centers you have, the slower the death rate, even well past keeping demand below 100%. There is no limit to how much Med Centers will help slow death rate, although, you may find it seems to affect things proportionally less as you build more.
The consumer factory is a must for Eden on Hard if you want 100% morale. There is a certain multiplier to your base morale, depending on difficulty level. They are as follows:
Eden Easy: 100%
Eden Medium: 92%
Eden Hard: 83%
Plymouth Easy: 110%
Plymouth Medium: 100%
Plymouth Hard: 92%
The highest morale level is at 90% and higher, so for Eden, this is not achievable on Hard without the help of event morale, which the Consumer Factory gives you. Basically, whenever something good or bad happens, it adds or subtracts to the event morale, which is added to your base colony morale (after the multiplier), and can account for morale being keep at 100% (or 0%), despite having conflicting colony conditions. Event morale decays over time. Every 2.56 ticks, it is divided by 2, so it will always tend to 0 over time if no events happen. Note that there is a huge penalty (-800) for killing "good" enemy buildings, such as residences and agridomes. Expect your morale to plummet to 0 for a while if you do this.
If there are enemies around, I find Med Centers can wait until they're taken care of (such as in Colony, Eden Starship), as the cost of staffing those Med Centers is a little too high early game. Kill the enemy first, and then build the Med Centers.
Also, the death rate at low morale is huge, and the birth rate is also much lower. Lower than the death rate in fact. So make sure to always keep morale up. I find dealing with initial colony conditions is sometimes a little more important than getting the nursery and university up, but the nursery and university should still be a fairly high priority. For instance, in Eden Starship, I tend to build a couple residences and an agridome before building the lab and researching Offspring Enhancement and Research Training Programs. That usually keeps morale sufficiently high that not too many people die while you're waiting to get those up.
