Don’t you think that the OpenGL programmer doesn’t have to be good and skilled nowadays? I don’t know many extensions and I cannot make fast program. My program with per-pixel diffuse, specular, shadows makes 20 FPS with 5000 triangles, and it’s done very good (in my opinion). I use VAR (i tried all other ways - display lists, pure glVertex) I have no idea what to do to make it faster and then I read that someone got 100 FPS with 20 000 triangles. It’s all because I don’t know some driver command or something (like, glUseVar(GL_DO_IT_FASTER) 
. Don’t you think that now you don’t have to be good programmer, but you have to know the proper functions that will do everything for you? You have to read somewhere how to send vertices to driver and driver (if you used proper extensions) will do everything, but if you haven’t read proper tutorial/paper/instruction you will have the same result but 10 times slower.
So basically what you’re saying is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you don’t know how to do things properly, that your programs will suck?
I fail to see how this is any different to the way programming has been for the past fifty years 
I’m also a bit confused what this has to do with Advanced OpenGL, so apologies for feeding the trolls
You seem to have problems with logical reasoning. You may be good and skilled and you may suck at OpenGL, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be good and skilled to make OpenGL work well.
There is no magic trick to make OpenGL go faster. It is a somewhat specialized subject and it is easy to do naive things to 3D hardware that slows it down. It requires experience and knowledge. Understanding why your program is slow is part of the challenge. Try working on that, is it really triangle count that’s the problem?