Ahem. Getting back to the point: Direct3D is great and there is no particular reason to jump away from it. OpenGL mostly works fine too, it's not ideal on Windows but I'm using it and getting by. (Allows me to share a lot of code.) The key point is to understand the underlying concepts and the underlying hardware -- and to some extent the OS and drivers, as well. With those things in hand, the APIs are really nothing more than necessary tools. Switching between them is just a matter of practical hassles, rather than any particular learning curve.

If I were teaching modern interactive graphics to undergraduate students today, I would spend the first few lectures on hardware and math. Those are far more important.

If UbiSoft offers to pay Microsoft for one of their DirectX consulting programmers, you don't think that this will happen?

I'm an engine programmer at Ubisoft. DirectX consulting programmers don't exist. This doesn't happen.

I'm sorry about the "James Camarack" thing.

And I have to thank you again, for clearing things up for me!

Its a crossover of James Cameron and John Carmack

Oh dear... We've created a monster...

WITH CHAINSAW POWERED LASER BEAMS!

If UbiSoft offers to pay Microsoft for one of their DirectX consulting programmers, you don't think that this will happen?

I'm an engine programmer at Ubisoft. DirectX consulting programmers don't exist. This doesn't happen.

The only graphics consultants you get in are the AMD and NVidia guys and mostly only if you have a deal with them to do a certain feature for their hardware. And there is a whole lot of nasty that happens with these deals as well as these guys pick their respective rivals driver apart and ask you to do features they know are faster in their implementation just to keep on top of the performance lists if your game is a benchmark game.

AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia, all have their own Field Application Engineers that are available to help optimise CPU/GPU codepaths for your product.
So yes, it can, and absolutely does happen. (although I'm in no way implying that marcClintDion is correct in everything he says obviously!)

I'm not sure about MS on the Windows side, but this is absolutely the case with the hardware companies, and for Xbox and PS devs too. That's partly what those NVIDIA/AMD splash logos on games are about. And developers DO get paid to support new DirectX versions and features. All the time. Quite a bit of money changed hands when DX11 was released, in order to have some games support it. The payers are simply the people who get the most immediate and concrete benefit from gamers needing the latest DirectX features. That's not Microsoft, it's the IHVs.

What Microsoft has done, historically, is to go out of their way to make DirectX development easy for small and large developers. And they did that very well for a very long time.