Well by that logic, IE is a great browser because a lot of people got some amazing applications to run on it despite the fact that it was a nightmare to develop for...
OpenGL is almost like the IE of graphics development. You usually have to support it because it's so ubiquitous, but it constantly makes you want to tear out your hair because it does so many unexpected things and you have to memorize 5000 little caveats.
What OpenGL does is hard - to make things worth fast across multiple platforms with backward compatibility. Not like IE which was/is stagnant because of big company sluggishness/exceptionalism, but because its open source trying to do a huge amount with limited resources. There are always higher level platforms if you want something easier to work with, but you sacrifice a little speed.
Here's the thing though: most of what OpenGL screws up is the not-hard stuff. Here are the main things wrong with OpenGL right now:
* Everything operates on and modifies implicit global state, especially with the various "bind" patterns (direct state access will help a lot with this). Even a first year CS student knows global state is bad. It was sort of acceptable-if-ugly back when the fixed function pipeline was the thing, but for almost the last 10 years that's been deprecated, and with how you program a GPU now that global state and bind patterns is ridiculous.
* Error handling is unfriendly and confusing and slow. It's very easy to accidentally send in a bad parameter to a function, have OpenGL silently ignore it, only for something to blow up in your program in a completely different module because that error went silently unchecked. This is just bad. Not only that, but glGetError rarely gives you any useful information. Why can't it at least tell me what function failed, and which parameter/value it was that made it fail? A lot of times you'll see an error in a complex function like glTexImage2d that has a ton of possible parameter combinations for "invalid value". Well, which one is invalid? What inputs would be valid? The driver knows, so why can't it tell me?
> Not like IE which was/is stagnant because of big company sluggishness/exceptionalism, but because its open source trying to do a huge amount with limited resources.
Have you looked at the companies that comprise the khronos group? They're not exactly poor. The problem isn't resources, it's bad design by committee.
OpenGL is almost like the IE of graphics development. You usually have to support it because it's so ubiquitous, but it constantly makes you want to tear out your hair because it does so many unexpected things and you have to memorize 5000 little caveats.