I hope people realize that if it was being rendered on remote servers, over the internet, the moment you lost your internet connection, you wouldn't see anything new and would be stuck on the same, degraded, or blank, screen? I also hope that people realize that this is not the case...

Since there is no impact to the server side, whether or not we have high resolution textures enabled, we should at least be given a choice. It's our machine, it's our game experience, and if we don't mind lower frame rates, we should at least have the freedom to choose. Since they are worried about people turning it on and having a "lesser" game experience, they could keep the option out of the UI, and have it only be able to be turned on through modifying the settings file. That way, only people that are explicitly looking to enable it, and who should have a good idea of the consequences, would be able to turn it on.