If Microsoft did anything like that they would be flushing their 2.5 billion dollars down the drain. The community that surrounds Minecraft is why it's worth so much.
I've seen too many times in the past where big organizations do things that don't seem to be in their best interest. Microsoft is made up of many people and one VP may decide that short term profits for a quarter (which increases his bonus for the year) trumps the wellness of a community. And he'll rationalize his decision as being better for the community.
I found NeHe's tutorials to be easy to follow especially since code that's ready to compile is provided at the end of each lesson:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/
Stay away from NeHe tutorials, they are badly written and really old. Pretty much everything they cover is deprecated and done in otherwise old fashioned ways.
This is a big problem with OpenGL tutorials in general, a lot of them cover old stuff that shouldn't be used any more.
The entire OpenGL fixed function pipeline is deprecated, replaced by programmable shader pipeline. It's a lot more work to get simple stuff done with shaders but it pays off in the end.
If you're looking to write a game (and not an engine) it may be a good idea to get an engine and not write "raw" OpenGL at all.
But if you only want to draw a rectangle with a solid color, you can do that using the scissor test and clearing "the screen". But that's about all you can do without shaders.
My understanding is that the NeHe tutorials are archaic and do not properly reflect modern OpenGL usage. Iirc the legacy constructs used in NeHe have been dropped in mobile implementations of OGL.
http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/
That's an excellent resource for modern OpenGL, I have links for a few others at home that I can't recall off the top of my head.
That or something very similar [1] draws a rectangle from pixel position (100,100) to (400,400) in many high level 2D graphics environments. Just posting this to point out that you do not have to make things more complicated than necessary.
OpenGL is a standard for hardware accelerated 3D graphics and it is inherently complex because of that. If you just want to do 2D do not bother with it.
If you're not feeling ready for 3D graphics, Khan Academy has a neat set of interactive lessons where you learn to draw and animate basic shapes using the HTML5 Canvas API (Javascript):
For example: http://www.space.com/15031-space-junk-station-astronaut-thre...