I'm really disappointed that I own a Ferrari and the speed limit is only 65mph. However, some day, the roads will catch up to the car, and I'll be able to. That is more or less what the plan was for FF14. Even at standard settings the game is prettier than most other games (lack of animations not with standing - that's a dev issue, not a capability issue). The point is, so WHAT if you can't run it at max -right- now. Of course it would look nice. Because it was meant to look nice six years from now when we all upgrade to the new Intel Oct-Core Windows X 128bit systems with 128gb of RAM rocking our nVidia Quad GPU 16x SLI PCIe x64 systems instead of just a really fast game that is fast because of junk graphics.
Not to say the game doesn't need optimization - It does. Its retarded to have a game that the recommended specs include systems that by definition have DirectX 11 and then rawk to the beat of DX9c. But seriously, its meant to grow into itself. Personally, I'd rather 10 years from now if I'm still playing this game see graphics that are relevant to the times.
/soapbox