opengl shading language 1.0 is not fully exploited but new hardware and shaders are coming and new tecnologies (unlimited detail with point cloud) permit to make incredible things. despite that lots of things can already be done without tesselation or geometry shading.
shaders languages is not so much complicated and there are tools as render monkey that are very usefull. New ideas comes and there is always someone that can make the code for those ideas working (maybe not so fast) on old shaders. I'm not criticizing who is using new tecnologies, but having people who is using top of the art tecnologies and hardwares must not discourage other to use simple shaders on their old machines
