this debate is sily, shaders arent special "extras". they are how modern hardware handles rendering. There will on most modern cards be no Fixed functions, all will be done via the shader architecture. You do need it, as much as in the old days they used hardware acceleration.

To say poeple dont care about shader, and that you can get good results by splashing some high res photo textures over everything and call it great misses the whole point of what the shader architecture is and what it does for you. A flat texture mapped on a cube is still just that, it never gets any more realistic-- it has nothing to do with the real appearance of things.

Shaders move the artist towards ever-better approximations of the real world, and to more complete control of the final image. 3D art isnt about the texture you slap on a polygon anymore, it's about how that polygon is rendered.

Also there is a myth shaders are slower than fixed functions. Using the various shader algorithms for certain things are better and faster than using fixed functions. Say you want to create a multitextured surface, you can write a shader that does it in a more efficient way than a fixed fuction routine, with less texture stages and passes. You can render a terrain with 5 texture blended by alpha masks in shader in one pass, whereas you may need 5 passes to do it in a fixed function approach. So there is no reason not to use shaders, and frankly poeple with older cards need to upgrade, or not expect all the newest effects.