Don't get me started on the amount of times I complained about there being much less fancy looking effects
The reason they're all gone and the game might not look as impressive, is because of the performance and memory -- These changes were made very early on in the mod's development, long before I got involved. There's also the fact that up until recently the only people really playing the mod were the people who worked on it the most, and most of these people play the game far zoomed out, rarely zoomed in -- so seeing this graphical fidelity and special effects didn't happen much for them. So, for them, stripping it out was almost a no-brainer.
But I'm trying to push to atleast bring back some simplified effects, at least for missile and rocket weapon explosions or something. Sprouto has said to me before that, with the vast amount of changes made since then that have also helped the performance, re-adding some effects might not have that much of an impact on performance. We would probably have to take a while and run the game multiple times, with effects and without effects, to see the difference. But it's definitely something I would vouch for - I, myself, like to zoom in on the action sometimes.
A separate version of the mod like that is perfectly possible. I've been talking about having the entire mod itself on a separate installation, if anything for neatness. But having two separate mod projects would be a lot of work. Essentially doubling the work done on all the units -- where on the main mod, we would have unit data that is stripped down to a bare minimum, and on the other we would have to keep in or replace some features that would otherwise be removed (like special effects, animations, LOD models, etc)