Game developers and application developers are some of the biggest reasons for the current state of OpenGL actually. Devs wanted openGL to give them more freedom like DirectX or for things to be more closely aligned to openGL ES for compatibility reasons. Hell, if you look around a bit you'll find devs who want openGL to let them get even more low level than they can now for beter performance. All that fixed functionality came with a performance price and often forced the developers to play tricks to get the effects they wanted.

To your direct complaints,

Texture loading was always a pain and often neccesitated going to outside libraries(based upon data formats), but texturing has barely changed in the new opengl other than the use of shaders to do the look up.

The basic lighting equations and material properties that openGL used are easy to find and can be implemented in shaders in about 15 minutes(hell the orange books should have most of them already implemented).

Matix math libraries have been available for ages and if that is still too much effort, there are libraries like GLM which have almost line for line direct replacements for the openGL matrix commands.

OpenGL shaders should mostly be cross platform. The real problems they had probably had to do with various extensions or features not being supported across all hardware or the hardware having different limitations. OpenGL specifies the minimums to be standard compliant but hardware can have different maximums and algorithms can change based upon those maximums.

Yes there is now a bit more up front cost to using a the Core profile of openGL, but the flexibility and performance gains are honestly worth it.

Either you are not looking hard enough or restricting yourself too much for the job you are looking for, i.e., certain location or research position. With a Masters in CS you should have a slight advantage over the BS people, but need to demonstrate it in interviews. If you want a research position, stay in school and get the PhD.

Widen what you are looking for and not take the IT position, unless you can't move away from your current location and have other responsibilities. Just because it would be easier and more convenient right now, doesn't mean it's the best in the long term. Life isn't always nice and easy.
I would look into contract work first, to get some experience, before taking a straight up IT support job. The east coast has tons of software contract placement agencies. Many times these jobs can be converted to full time.

WIthout fax, paperwork heavy businesses (like my Flex administrator who needs substantiation on everything!) would need someone at the other end trained to open thousands of emails and print them all out on their end every day. Faxes save that time consuming step and a body. The majority of office workers cannot work off digital copies of long documents. Fax doesn't really have a place with one-on-one and small business communication, but I highly doubt the corporate world will ever replace it with the digital alternative, unless it is the one button solution that automatically prints your faxed emails when received. It's not the sending part that's the problem; everyone is just tied to hard copy.

OLIVER!!