Just under 2000 instructions and at period 37, this machine is built around the following idea:

"Replace each pattern atom with its 3-atom cardinal complement (e.g. replace Earth with the trio Air-Fire-Water)."
(This idea is also used in my warm-up solve "Servin's Filter".)

This idea is really good for minimizing RATE:
1. Calculating the complement is an expensive ONE-TIME operation, while copying an existing complement onto a 3-salt stick is fast, cheap, and compact.
2. The act of comparing an unknown against the complement is also fast, cheap and compact, since we just place all four atoms on a unification glyph. If quintessence appears, we have a match.

This idea is also nice because it generalizes to a match pattern of any length - just create a unification station for each pattern atom and load the atom's complement. With back-duplication, the stations don't need a Berlo!

Of course, an idea is not the same as an implementation. To get the machine to exist, I threw parts at the board until I could get it to compute the complements, initialize the unification stations, package inputs, feed the Hungry Hungry Disposal, do some recycling, and get quintessence atoms to a safe place to output results. All this duct tape and twine has definitely murdered my metric score, and I don't have the determination to clean it up, but I'm sure the core idea is the winning strategy.

I'll end with a fun fact: the fifth Match Pattern molecule pulled is the only one that matters - every other molecule from that input is used as a 3-salt-stick. A copy of the pattern appears above-right of the space-rocket track.