Might be me, but I've not found OpenGL that bad to be honest. A lot of the deprecated commands require an extra i or another character for some reason which is annoying. But apart from that, it's been rather straight forward and when building a small engine I've not really used that much code to get a 3D GL renderer running.. It's mainly in the shaders and with LWJGL you can import multiple versions of the GL library, although I have had specific versions complain about overlapping.
Had a few culling issues, I some how managed to mess it up so when the cube spins it doesn't remove the cull which I sorted out and trying to sort out the flipped buffer in LWJGL was a bit of a pain even with direction. Apart from that all pretty much straight forward.!
I'd honestly try LWJGL and work though some tutorials on youtube, you may find it's not all that scary.