You are correct it's been heavily modified, which is why I wrote about it in my op. however the game engine itself is fairly crippled by poor performance, it's the nature of the engine. It's not just a flat 1 example accusation, there are other AAA mmo's who have or are using it.. and that other one i mentioned ran even worse than this, but my point is, is its running like this now, after all of 5 years of improvements and modifications by bioware, the engine itself isn't a powerhouse of performance.
It's indeed inheritly very slow. And such, having such low minimum specs, is frankly a falsehood, unless people don't care about quality of game experience when they buy the game and expect it to actually be playable when they install it on a minimum spec system.