Point about argument ignored.
None of these requests are particularly stressful on the video system because they can be turned off, so that's not a valid argument against AO. AO is merely another way of improving the visual elements of the game. All elements would improve for systems that can handle the change, and those that can't would have slightly different textures, but the same performance.
Improvements include a better perception of depth and an improvement in the appearance of all 3D shapes.
The primary reason the changes would be seen as an improvement are that the textures would go from phong shading, to an ambient occlusion method, which is much closer to what you see when you view objects in reality. Phong shading can be deceptive because when you consider things like level of detail (LOD) simplification the shading method might be reduced to where top/bottom or front/back are too similar, which makes it difficult to distinguish the proper situation. Your "3 monitor" setup will be more effective, because the higher resolution will bring those features out, but once 4k monitors are available at an affordable price (I give it a year) this will be a critical feature. More importantly to me, the perception of depth upon ground features should be more greatly enhanced, making it even more attractive to feature low level fights in videos.
I would also like to suggest we go to a more unsaturated appearance, because I see PC generated colors to extend outside of what actually occurs in nature. Unsaturating color is something your brain does in combat anyway, so no harm/no foul making use of it. There are other techniques HTC could use, but this would be a great place for the discussion to begin.