Not to feed the flames here... but I'm extremely disappointed by Bioware's decision on the matter, and I'm pretty confident that their decision to cater to the lowest common denominator and only that, will not work to their advantage.
This is the first time I have ever played an MMO where developers have decided to halve the texture quality not as an option but as a mandatory change across all clients. It's unforgivable, and the reasons behind it are ridiculous.
Until now, I've been tinkering a lot with the .ini as well as NvidiaInspector to try to force high res character textures.
Thinking it was an LOD bug, I forced the LOD bias to -3.00 and noticed something else happening instead. It seems we may not even be getting the best environment textures the game has to offer because the standard LOD refuses to render them.
I've attached screenshots below for comparison between what the game is rendering at standard "high" settings, and what the game renders with LOD bias forced below the standard threshold.
Standard LOD:
http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j136/Cgramnaes/SWTOR_No_LOD.jpg
Forced LOD:
http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j136/Cgramnaes/SWTOR_Forced_LOD.jpg
I should also mention that the change has made no impact on my FPS, and has if anything made the game run smoother for me.