[pygame] PyOpenGL - Decent Looking 3D For Newbies?

[Kris Schnee <kschnee@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I've all but given up on making PyOgre work, because following its 
creators' instructions and running its demo programs doesn't work, and 
because its creators' advice was (a) quit yer whining and (b) use plain 
OGRE, ie. write my program in raw and terrifying C.

I had been working in PyOpenGL, and gotten this sort of graphics in a 
rotatable landscape display:
http://www.xepher.net/~kschnee/pics/bluecolony02.jpg
The problem being that this is hideous. Is there a way to make OpenGL 
graphics that actually look decent, for someone working alone, without 
3D modeling programs (except Terragen and POV-Ray)? I'd like to draw a 
simple outdoor landscape and interface that runs at a decent speed. I do 
know there's a NeHe tutorial on terrains, but:

So far I've found that drawing text in PyOpenGL is very slow, even when 
each line is drawn by calling a list, which calls lists for each letter. 
Does SiGL help in this respect? The kind of framerates I'm getting so 
far, using Pygame for the event loop, are:

-Draw nothing; don't clear screen etc.: 300+ FPS
-Draw nothing; clear screen & switch between 2D/3D: 200+ FPS
-Cursor only: 200+ FPS
-Cursor, land & neat translucent water plane: 35 FPS
-Cursor & interface w/text: 19 FPS
-Interface w/text only: 19 FPS
-Cursor, land, water, and interface w/text: 13 FPS
-Ditto, but 800x600 fullscreen instead of 800x600 windowed: 13 FPS
-Ditto, but 1024x768 fullscreen instead of 800x600 windowed: 12 FPS

Because of the text, OpenGL isn't looking practical. Right now I'm 
thinking I should use plain PyGame for 2D graphics; so far I can get 
over 100 FPS for a simple homebrew interface with lots of text on the 
screen.

Kris