I see what you are saying, but my take on this is that the Original vision irrespective of platform was too lofty for the engine, scale and sheer amount of versions they wanted to ship.
Ubisoft are a large corporate and they will have many sections working on the game in separate parts of the world (you can see the cutscenes in the game are not consistent in quality) let alone office. Bug tweaking, version control literately everything about this game has been a mess and a mix-up from PR to launch and I the visuals from the E3 reveal are possible and most likely will be beaten on these "lowly" consoles within the next 12 months, you could argue Second Son already does!
Cross Gen, Cross Platform, Launch games are never ever indicative of a Generations potential or ability and I feel this game falls into the "too many cooks, not enough time camp" for sure and saying they made a conscious effort to cut effects (that they spent time working into a broken state in the game but employed in the cutscene's (headlights in rain, stronger DoF etc) even on consoles just has chaos and time written all over it.