After much comparison of famous author's configs, and Jrobs, I've decided to keep a lot of the object, vegetation, shadow and lighting variables, fine tune them some more to my liking, then throw on proper full AF, with SSAO, 4xaa or EdgeAA 2x and a few budget variables for extra performance, all while under XP.
As previously mentioned, some shaders need to be tuned to the point where you get the "Very High" features you want, and then strip down the rest, but unfortunatley this is ultimatley not possible.
The only real way to ensure this is to run under XP "High" then manually set your increased variables at the higher levels you wish.
If you slim Very High really hard, right to the point where you're about to lose your image quality, you can gain a good 10-20fps. You can turn right around and run it in XP, and gain 30-40fps. Slap in the variables you really want, and you're back down to 10-20fps but with the increased IQ. Doing that in Vista can make the game almost unplayabale again.
The really 'soft' or extreme lighting that we saw from Crysis promos and etc. are just not attainable, as the shaders are missing entirely. With Warhead being released, I doubt we'll ever see the patch that was promised to us, which was to include those shaders or a.k.a. the "extreme" version.
So if you're looking at Jrob's stuff thinking, 'well this doesn't improve performance, it makes it worse overall, but I still want to USE it, then try running it in XP."
Also, if anyone hasn't already noticed, there's a heavy dithering effect at night time when in Vista. Using XP makes that go away. In some ways it helps create realism, but the amount used is a bit too much.
Below I've included two screens representing the lighting, shadows, overall color grade, intensity, contrast and vegetation blending I'm using. Pardon if it seems lower res, TPU isn't showing it in 1920.