So..to those of you saying the PS3 WAS NOT going to limit this game.

[Kittra]

I'm not trying to dispute your claims here, but I'd love to know why my system failed so terribly at playing FFXIV 1.0 then.

At the time I had a 3.0 ghz Core 2 Duo and an ATI 5850. The only real weak point was 2gb ram. But the game performed so terribly it was unplayable - and I'm not super picky about frame rates. I tested all sorts of configurations too trying to improve performance.

I also recall seeing people with much better systems, i5/17, more ram, beefy gpu, complaining about poor performance; am I the only one that remembers things being this way?

I think this is because "originally" AO and Depth of Field were on by default even in Standard mode... The type of AO they were trying to use with version 1.0 simply does not play nice with DirectX9 and it reduced all of my systems to a crawl when either this or Depth of Field were switched on.

It didn't help that the game's configuration (set separately outside the game) didn't even list them in the "video" tab, but under the Misc. tab where completely useless options like Cut-scene effects were kept.

They also didn't call many of the video configuration options by their actual "technical" names, so a lot of tinkering went into getting the correct settings down.
Simply selecting High, Standard or Low settings did not really change anything other than the anti-aliasing settings unlike now where it changes all of the settings.