@dadaboomda, there is virtually no-one who will use the settings you suggest. Primarily, its because it will look awful. About the most important factor in realistic world-like graphics are shadows; and you suggest to turn them to low or off. It's a way to get high fps, but virtually no-one will want to do it unless they like driving cartoon racing cars.
One of the big problems with rF2 has always been shadows. It still persists today, with wildly varying results at different LODs. Throwing hardware at the problem doesn't seem to help it. iRacing used to have two forms of shadows; volume and maps. The volumes were projected directly from the 3D models and used the CPU to help define them. They've almost completely eliminated those now, but I had a large fight with the dev who wanted to pull them from the code and rely entirely on maps; those draw way faster, but have terrible artifacts with jagged edges that they use particular techniques to try and soften the edges of. My argument was, if you want to use your processing power to have much higher quality shadows, that should be the choice of the user, given that the code existed to do it both ways. He wouldn't have it, and now, the shadows in that game look just as bad as shadows in all the other games.
This isn't simply an issue of doing a small optimization to the GT3 cars; its an inherent issue in the game code that has existed from the beginning. About 3 years ago the DX9 engine had similar terrible frame rates to what we now get, and ISI underwent a task to optimize, and raised the fps by about 50% into useable territory. Now, its back into unusable land. PC2 has had a significant upgrade from PC1 in its handling of dynamic lighting and shadow drawing; its almost impossible to see glaring issues now except for some special cases. The degree of polish they have applied to this is huge. S397 don't have that level of polish; its v1, where SMS are on v3 and iRacing are about at the same and trying to reverse engineer dynamic lighting into what they have, which stands a fair chance of putting them back at v1 quality.
in my case to get something that looks reasonable, I turn the shadows to high. In doing so, I have to give up other settings. And in particular, at present, I am having to sacrifice the postprocessing effects that give all the new eye candy. It's not reasonable for S397 to sit and say they are improving the graphics, but then, anyone who got decent frame rates in the past now cannot enable any of the settings that get them that better world. There's things need fixing and changing in the base code before these can be utilized, and the roadmap didn't address this and its the biggest omission.
The second big omission is not addressing the numerous existing bugs and gotchas. And there are certain design decisions that need to be revisited that hold lots of things back re: packaging, mods, DLC etc.
They've done a good job doing what they said they would do as a 'state of the union' at the end of year one. DX11 and VR delivered, to a large extent. Licensed content delivered, to a large extent. The UI has had the goalposts moved and isn't done; I don't think people worry so much about that, frankly, and are happy to give them more time to get this right. But there's an awful lot of what existed before, and what has been added (like the free Radical and Zandvoort), that still has that unfinished feel to it that also plagued ISI. It's what SMS have more successfully done with PC2 on the core sim; added polish and eliminated issues; though they too have introduced new issues on the added capabilities. It's the same issue at iRacing; they get continually told by users to 'fix their shit' and they just keep pumping out new stuff.
