To be fair, while I don't know the reasoning I know that often these sorts of things are set lower to run on lower-end machines. I've been in plenty of MMOs where you could adjust display radius for grass and trees, # of characters displayed before they started disappearing, etc. to adjust for your own system's graphics. We've got a lot of adjustments in XIV - down to limb darkening, movement physics for other PCs, etc - so unless there's a reason beyond graphics I can't see why this couldn't be an option. I know this game has some weird system limitations but come on.