It takes dozens of lines of code to draw a triangle in modern OpenGL. You were presumably using immediate mode, which is ancient and deprecated because it has horrible performance on modern hardware. Given that the whole point of an API for hardware accelerated graphics is better performance, that's a big problem.

Immediate mode OpenGL not even a particularly friendly API, either. I found its implicit global mutable state for things like the matrix stack to be deeply confusing. There's much better drawing libraries out there if what you're looking for is ease-of-use.