My $0.02 on the matter is that games do have to advance with the times at some point. Could you imagine if we were trying to play this game on an old Atari because they didn't want to make people have to buy updated hardware?
I too would love to have weather, and I know I would get a frame rate hit for sure, but the added realism and depth to the game would be really neat and make it worth it in my opinion. There are already clouds in-game and no one complains about those, can't they just make storm clouds more opaque (Shorter draw distance)?
I do know of a game that has a "classic" graphics pack that takes considerably less resources than the "premium" graphics pack. Both show the same things on screen, but one has less details than the other (ie. classic weather doesn't have the "Wow!" factor, but it has the same visual impairments as the premium weather). Perhaps this
is the way forward for this game so we don't lose the players that have been around forever and can't afford to upgrade their computers.
I know I've posted this idea before, but why not have an arena with weather, and one without?