This is something that has become increasingly noticeable with the introduction of the spyglass. The draw distance in the current build of game is affecting game mechanics. Here are a couple examples:
Spyglass range exceeds the distance at which player models pop in. For instance, my crew was looking at a ship, and enemy character models were sporadically popping in and out. Strangely we witnessed one character walking up the bow and then disappearing as he approached the tip (even though the tip of the bow was actually nearer to our ship).
Even more problematically, the draw distance makes gunpowder barrel gameplay difficult and visually unimpressive. In one case, our crew was throwing barrels off the stern of our ship towards a pursuing galleon and even though the ship was relatively close to us, the game was not rendering explosions hitting the pursuing ship. The only way that we were able to determine that we got hits was because we had a player in the water closer to the ship (and the ship inevitably ended up sinking). Being able to see the explosions from gunpowder barrels is key to being able to use the barrels properly and also contributes to the overall enjoyment and impressiveness of the game's aesthetics (this is something incredibly important for streaming).
Finally, islands are just simply ugly and don't relay very much visual information before their textures load in. When you look at an island from a distance using the spyglass it essentially looks like a jumbled mess of geometry. So if you're scouting islands for resources like gunpowder barrels, you really have to get quite close (and have the texture and island intro scene load-in) before you are able to do any resource scouting.
I sincerely hope that this is something that will improve with the final build of the game, because it is significantly impacting some of the new game mechanics.
