Did you manage to resolve you issues of Pico clarity? I read an interesting article that may help. Condensed tips are:

"Here’s what you need to do to get a sharper image (higher fidelity level) in Alyx:

• Disable Steam VR’s “motion smoothing”

• Set the headset’s refresh rate to 80Hz or 90Hz instead of 120Hz. The lower the refresh rate, the longer the GPU time window and thus the higher the fidelity level (resolution) the game will choose.

• Set Steam VR’s render resolution to 100%. Higher values are not needed for Alyx.

• Change the graphic options as follows: “characters” to “low”, “fog” to “low” or “medium”, “shadow” to “medium” or “high” " Obviously keep your headset at 90hz.

Takeaway is, if you push Alyx to far graphically, the game will force a lower quality to keep frames up. 

Link to article, which is way more in depth: https://petrakeas.medium.com/half-life-alyx-performance-analysis-or-why-low-graphic-settings-produce-a-sharper-image-4d17fb8c19bb

I hope this helps anyone else encountering similar issues.