My guess is, like others have said, that the greater emphasis on the veneration of images is due to liturgy developing differently in remote parts of the world. The formal and elaborate veneration of images is not something handed down from the Apostles, but something that developed gradually with time. The Catholic Encyclopedia states,
Distinct from the admission of images is the question of the way they are treated. What signs of reverence, if any, did the first Christians give to the images in their catacombs and churches? For the first period we have no information. There are so few references to images at all in the earliest Christian literature that we should hardly have suspected their ubiquitous presence were they not actually there in the catacombs as the most convincing argument. But these catacomb paintings tell us nothing about how they were treated. We may take it for granted, on the one hand, that the first Christians understood quite well that paintings may not have any share in the adoration due to God alone. Their monotheism, their insistence on the fact that they serve only one almighty unseen God, their horror of the idolatry of their neighbours, the torture and death that their martyrs suffered rather than lay a grain of incense before the statue of the emperor’s numen are enough to convince us that they were not setting up rows of idols of their own. On the other hand, the place of honour they give to their symbols and pictures, the care with which they decorate them argue that they treated representations of their most sacred beliefs with at least decent reverence. It is from this reverence that the whole tradition of venerating holy images gradually and naturally developed. After the time of Constantine it is still mainly by conjecture that we are able to deduce the way these images were treated. The etiquette of the Byzantine court gradually evolved elaborate forms of respect, not only for the person of Ceesar but even for his statues and symbols. Philostorgius (who was an Iconoclast long before the eighth century) says that in the fourth century the Christian Roman citizens in the East offered gifts, incense, and even prayers, to the statues of the emperor (Hist. eccl., II, 17). It would be natural that people who bowed to, kissed, incensed the imperial eagles and images of Caesar (with no suspicion of anything like idolatry), who paid elaborate reverence to an empty throne as his symbol, should give the same signs to the cross, the images of Christ, and the altar. So in the first Byzantine centuries there grew up traditions of respect that gradually became fixed, as does all ceremonial. Such practices spread in some measure to Rome and the West, but their home was the Court at Constantinople. Long afterwards the Frankish bishops in the eighth century were still unable to understand forms that in the East were natural and obvious, but to Germans seemed degrading and servile (Synod of Frankfort, 794; see ICONOCLASM IV). It is significant too that, although Rome and Constantinople agree entirely as to the principle of honouring holy images with signs of reverence, the descendants of the subjects of the Eastern emperor still go far beyond us in the use of such signs.
The development was then a question of genera fashion rather than of principle. To the Byzantine Christian of the fifth and sixth centuries prostrations, kisses, incense were the natural ways of showing honour to any one; he was used to such things, even applied to his civil and social superiors; he was accustomed to treat symbols in the same way, giving them relative honour that was obviously meant really for their prototypes. And so he carried his normal habits with him into church. Tradition, the conservative instinct that in ecclesiastical matters always insists or custom, gradually stereotyped such practices till they were written down as rubrics and became part of the ritual. Nor is there any suspicion that the people who were unconsciously evolving this ritual, confused the image with its prototype or forgot that to God only supreme homage is due. The forms they used were as natural to them as saluting a flag is to us.
newadvent.org/cathen/07664a.htm
The mistake is if we assume that Orthodoxy as practiced in Twenty-First Century Moscow is identical to the worship of the Apostles in the First Century. Contrary to what I have seen some Orthodox posters claim online, St. Paul did not celebrate the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. The Romans did not tear out their icons or remove them from their liturgy. The Oriental customs were never part of their tradition to begin with.
Well said.
… as do stained glass windows and statues … bibles and missals, sacred music and hymns … 
… its not one or the other … they are all important …