When 1.0 shipped it had very steep hardware requirements. The recommended specs were an Intel Core i7 @ 2.66 GHz (or better) and an GTX 460 w/ 768MB RAM, which would get you at least 30 fps @ 1280x720. The GTX 400 series had been launched just months before the game's launch. It wasn't poorly optimized. Rather it was intended to be run on very high end desktop machines less than a year old when it first came out. Perhaps they saw posts with wild hardware requirements and thought that pretty graphics would blind us.
The 1.0 developer's philosophy behind FFXIV was that any problem can be solved thru updates and patches. Something they learned over the time as they worked on FFXI. Unfortunately they ignored the changes made to the genre over they eight years since the launch of FFXI in 2002. It had evolved subsequently since then. The development team did not. Except when it came to graphics of course.