On a slightly serious note, the "distancing" seems to be the main culprit. Why there isn't a setting in F7 Options for character distance, I don't know. I just tried this Low/Medium/High with distance-to-object being the only factor that made a difference.
This must be one of the many "small improvements" made ostensibly for performance reasons. Alas, the client-side graphics rendering performance isn't the bottleneck for most users. It honestly seemed more efficient to have only a single texture-group rendering aspect regardless of distance. Doesn't seem to have made any difference at all, for server-side lag in SvS. But in a crowded setting like "Feats of Strength" this might have come in handy.