1) Here's the thing: Gnome 3 has been largely redesigned. A lot of features went away, because the developers don't want to bother supporting them. If someone wants to develop that feature, nobody's stopping them: All you have to do is do a gnome-shell extension. Then you can do icons and launchers and window-lists and whatever you want. Extra panels, drawers, crazy applets, whatever you want. But the onus is on the extension developer to maintain it, not the Gnome 3 devs who are focused on making the core desktop experience work well. If you come up with something that genuinely improves the experience, they might pull it into mainline, but that doesn't effect whether or not it's useful for you.
2) OpenGL is a problem? It better not be. If it is, your hardware providers are screwing you over. That's pretty crappy. Open-source radeon and intel support's generally worked well for me. Keep in mind they're not doing ooooOOo 3D effects. They're just relying on the drivers providing some basic acceleration primitives. If your drivers can't even do that, your options for running modern maintained software are going to keep getting narrower and narrower, regardless of your desktop environment.