Yes, as your timings are increased, the maximum frequency is reduced. This kinda makes sense because the overall step pulse becomes longer so fewer can fit into one second.
I think a lot of recommendations are based on very safe values because we want to make sure machines move!
After a lot of experimentation to find the optimum values for my open loop hardware, with a Mesa card, I settled on
25 x microstepping (5000 pulses/rev)
DIRSETUP = 500
DIRHOLD = 500
STEPLEN = 1000
STEPSPACE = 1000
STEP_SCALE = 1000
This gave me a max velocity of 60mm/sec (3600mm/min) on a 5mm ball screw on my plasma Z axis
Experimenting to get the max velocity got much higher values but it all went to shit once let loose in the real world with missing steps on uptravel.
The other thing I found on my closed loop ethercat mill conversion was that I was getting following errors on homing. I decided this was probably due to excessive acceleration settings whch meant on decelleration, table inertia prevented it from following the commanded profile. Sure enough, reducing the max accelleration solved the problem.
So whilst the maths will get you so far, you have to test in your application to fine tune.