Question how to evaluate sequence quality

I believe your import command should be something like the following:

qiime tools import \
    --input-path expected-sequences.fasta \
    --output-path expected-sequences.qza \
    --type 'FeatureData[Sequence]'

It looks like you are attempting to import a directory called "MOCK", so the importer is expecting a named file inside. Import the file explicitly instead.