Valve: Steam’d Penguins

It is entirely up to you whether you use those extensions. Feature parity with D3D10/11 was already with OpenGL 3.2, OpenGL3 is supported by any relevant driver on linux these days. What you seem to ignore is that the extensions is one of the mechanisms that allow OpenGL to advance, it is a way to thread water with new functionality. If it works out well and developers like it, it has a high probablity of being added in the next iteration of OpenGL. If it bothers you, then simply target a specific OpenGL version. That was even worse with D3D where targeting version was standardised only with D3D10 as far as I recall.

>It's just that everybody have resigned themselves to the inevitable. We're not getting Longs Peak so we might as well shut up and continue to deal with the legacy crap.

No they don't. The pointer issue has been openly discussed, you just need to go where the discussion is at. You seem to believe that you know what opengl5 should look like. Hence, I challenge you to share your views here:
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/showthread.php/17...