CoD will always strive for 60fps over everything else, so that's not a realistic example. Also, we're not talking about multiple settings here and a double the frame rate difference. It's one setting users can toggle if they want a slightly better looking game or a slightly better playing game. Again this has been going on in a much deeper and complicated fashion in the PC market for decades and yet many PC games are still optimized perfectly fine for a wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide array of rigs. There are magnitudes less things that can go wrong with a console where you're working with one hardware build. So any optimization worries should be directed at the developer, not the idea that giving gamers choices means the games won't be optimized.

Ubisoft already makes poorly optimized games that routinely have issues. Even if they settled for somewhere in the middle, or picked the lighting or picked the framerate, the game will still probably have issues. However, developers who routinely put out quality made games will still put out quality made games. I mean, you're worried about what "lazy devs" are going to do.. we don't have to wait to see any future ramifications of this. "Lazy devs" are going to be lazy devs and put out games that reflect that, whether they have 20 different visual customization toggles, or 10, or 0.