I have to disagree here, in my 98 sport the high beams are much brighter than the low beams! Sure, they don't get much of the ground right in front of me, but when I turn them on I can reach pretty far down the road and all the road signs waaaay in the distance light up too. Perhaps your headlights are really fogged up if they're so bad for you? Or ya got some bad lightbulbs in it?
You can easily see road signs a couple hundred yards away even with a cheap flashlight. That's because road signs are retroreflective. If you are not familiar with the term, a retroreflector is a kind of mirror or prism that sends light back to where it came from. Road signs (as well as license plates in many states) use a special paint that has tiny glass cubes embedded. Unfortunately, deer don't wear retroflectors (albeit some humans, like traffic cops, truck drivers or cyclists, do).
As for my Explorer headlights, I can probably get a 10% improvement by upgrading the bulbs to latest and greatest "Silverstars" or something like that, even though they had been upgraded at least once already. However, for reference, some years back I converted the silly dual-filament lights in my Crown Vic to HID reflectors. And the difference was - no pun intended - night and day. So why am I not doing this for the Explorer? Several reasons:
1) We own an imported SUV with modern reflector headlights that I prefer to drive (and not just for its much better lights), except when needing to tow something really heavy.
2) The Explorer lamps are very small and there is not enough room in there to fit a decent HID reflector.
3) I don't know what defocusing effect that strange pattern on the lens will have on the reflectors. Lamps with clear lenses are available, but are horribly expensive. Incidentally, if someone converted to reflectors and kept the OEM lenses, I would like to know the result.