After reviewing the mechanics of deferred lighting, I need to amend my previous comment. Deferred lighting actually greatly side-steps quite a bit of the computational overhead when dealing with large texture sizes. Given that, I'd say the largest contributor to the lack of HD textures is the amount of work involved in upgrading the new models to be on par with the old ones. That being said, I am always inclined to believe that the producers of a game know more about the construction of that game than even very skilled consumers. I like to believe that if Yoshi-P says it isn't the best direction for FFXIV, he has some inkling what he is talking about. Naive? Perhaps, but it certainly makes things all rosy colored.