Basically what everyone is saying is that there is wisdom in not trying to be a good teacher and not trying to improve the learning process because the status quo has the advantage of teaching people how to learn without teachers. To me this seems absurd.

The code is given to you with a high-level explanation and that's it. It's like showing a person an airplane and then explaining the physics that make it fly. It doesn't matter if the learner understand the physics, they'll still crash.

A tutorial for a high-level graphics task won't be written for absolute beginners. That's absolutely natural and common, in all areas, not just programming.
The standard process of learning ANYTHING consists of steps or lessons or levels etc.

Tutorials usually cover a specific problem. There are tutorials how to create a Direct3D device (plenty of). There are tutorials how to render a triangle (again, plenty of). There are even tutorials covering both of those (as creating a device alone isn't much attractive, so most beginners tutorials include also some rendering). But you cannot expect these basic tasks to be fully explained in every tutorial. People who are interested in HDR rendering would be bored with chapters 1 to 20 (out of 25), because they know how to do it, they are interested only in HRD.
Yes, such a tutorial could exist, everyone can simply skip to the chapter he's interested in, no harm done. But who would want to WRITE such a tutorial? Who would want to explain all the basic stuff again and again and again? Who would make 50 pages long tutorials just to say on pages 49-50 how to filter shadow edges?

What you really need is a SET of tutorials, or better a book for beginners - such books are great, as you progress in reading, you progress in your skill.

I can use your analogy with airplane. Try to think about it, if we take it into extreme, what you really want from the tutorials is something like specialized instructions "emergency landing with landing gear failure" containing also the whole description how does a plane work, how to start a plane, how to take off, how to fly etc. That's not a tutorial, that's a full manual.

Or, maybe a better example - do you think that it's wrong when a math schoolbook titled "differential equations" expects the readers to know basics and just uses terms like "multiply two numbers" without further explaining HOW?

I think you guys are completely misunderstanding what I originally asked for. All I am trying to do IS render a quad to the screen and apply a pixel shader to it.

Seriously guys, I learned HLSL in like 5 minutes doing the tutorials included inside Shazzam. I spent weeks trying to learn Joomla with absolutely no web experience whatsoever, I even asked on their forums for tutorials that give instructions, and I got similar responses. I told them: I don't need implementation specific details, all that stuff should be abstracted far beyond what is seen by the user." It was only after I found some videos with step by step instructions on what to DO that I began to understand how it worked internally. And I was using some pretty nifty features after just watching about an hour of tutorials.

I understand that you guys think the introductions are widely available, but as I said they are not good enough because they lack a key element: interaction. http://www.rastertek.com/dx11tut01.html contains a "To do list" at the bottom, and while there is only one, I'll have to give it the benefit of the doubt for now. In the end that's the kind of guided experience I am looking for. And while I think Zern is a troll I have to thank him for posting this. It was not one of the tutorials I found while searching by myself.