Consoles are holding this game back (graphically)

[DracotheDragon]

"Accessible" is a PR word. In this case, changes were made and limitations were put in place to make it accessible to more players, those being console players. Graphical fidelity was compromised for this. Poor performance and optimization was at fault for 1.0. For those that have the money, the optional sliders should be able to reach higher.

not really, for 1.0 even on good and high grade PC's of the time, (aka 2011 and 2012.) this game ran poorly, to the point where most wouldn't consider doing any of the end game content.
it started to clean up with more simplified instances that started to take up the final games zones, look at any video of the 1.0 game now, and you can see it runs below 30 FPS, players were derenderd in order to save space, but all the plants you saw in ul;dah do not de render until you are out of the city, each plant has the same if not more polygons then the player causing lag and performance issues, Not only this but the lack of jumping was due to limitations in 1.0, as well as having different mounts.
scripting bugs ran rampant and a lot of players have rose coloured glasses, some animations looked better and others you could see all the key framing from miles is off putting. By making this game 'accessible' they focused on the lowest common denominator, which is low grade PC's and the PS3, which are being dropped by 4.0, when they are dropped the lowest common denominator is Middle ground PC's before PS4s and High middle PC's, this game was tailored to use a more simplified art style for a more consistent frame rate.

along side this, but they also wanted the player base to expand with PC being stable at around, 30 frames solid, the only time you can see any performance lag on the PS4 or even a high grade PC is in the trial 'a relic reborn Dhrome chimera' due to a rendering bug because of it's unique storm weather effects when you look in a direction the whole map is rendering with this pattern.

yes they focused on optimisation but they didn't gut the game to bare bones, if anything they have now added far more to it then what was in 1.0

if you truly want to blame someone blame computers made before 2010, that can struggle with this game (the ps3 falls into this sadly.), because that is what happens with most MMO's as they evolve, as with any game the PS4 (and Xbone if that deal goes though) are capable of sustaining this game for a while due to there processing power and graphic cards, which most high middle PC's ship with when purchased.