It reminds me of the progression that I've gone through mentally, regarding 3D graphics. 1. What's all this matrix crap? I can take object and camera coords an

It reminds me of the progression that I've gone through mentally, regarding 3D graphics. 1. What's all this matrix crap? I can take object and camera coords and calculate out a screen coordinate easily with some simple algebra and trig. 2. Oh, OK. Use matrices properly, and you can get rid of some repeated operations. 3. Classic GL mostly takes care of the matrix operations for me, and leaves me with a simple-ish interface for modifying the state machine (goodness, there's a lot of data to feed into it though). 4. Modern OpenGL: Erghh, boilerplate! 5. Build some utility functions and bootstrap yourself out of there, and the interface is so much more powerful. Sure, you have to explicitly specify some more things. Another way to put that is that you can change things that used to be implicitly defined. It's a wonderful bit of freedom, actually.