Am I the only one who finds DX9 not all that extremly different than DX11? It could be the matter of fact that I started with shaders right away when learning DX9, and don't get me wrong i do like DX11's interface much more since its way cleaner, but the key concepts still remain. Individual states have been replaced by state objects, cbuffers instead of constant registers, and so on, but honestly, if you have learned DX9 without the FFP, it shouldn't be too hard to switch to DX11, and you'd already have learned a lot of concepts you need for eigther API...
You're not the only one. The kind of thinking you need to do about how you manage your objects and (many, but not all) of your states is very similar if using shaders and vertex buffers/declarations for everything in D3D9. Some states and other API differences can lead to a fairly large restructuring of code, however; particularly if using Effects in D3D9.
It is simpler to start - you need MUCH less code to get your first 3D application working and you don't need to learn so much (you don't need to learn the principle of shaders, HLSL etc.).It is simpler when you don't need anything complex. You just set the proper states and you're done.
If you look upthread, I made much the same observation; you'll get no arguments from me on that count.
Seriously - just setting states and transform matrices IS simpler.
It's simpler if you're doing simpler stuff. As soon as you go to even moderately complex stuff than can still be handled by the FFP, it can become a horrible nightmare. To take a small example I did recently: I wanted to capture the screen image, greyscale it, then shift it to a brown-ish colour. IIRC I had to go into BumpEnvMap stuff to do that with FFP, and it was a 4 stage blend, not to mention the extra potential problems that could arise if I'd neglected to shut down states properly (always a key problem, often overlooked). By comparison it was one line of HLSL code - boom, done, and no state shutdown concerns.