In my opinion, that alone can be a complicated thing to deal with, so I don't see why engines go so far beyond it. Is there a graphics engine anywhere that strives to be this simple, leaving the game up to me instead of bouncing around trying to help with things that it is incapable of doing to my specifications?
Definitely. In fact, you're whole post sounds like an exact description of OGRE; it not only meets every requirement you mentioned, but exceeds them in many ways. OGRE, the Object-oriented Graphics Rendering Engine specializes in graphics alone, and is widely considered the best real-time graphics rendering engine available, except for the top-of-the-line AAA engines.
And one of the best things is that it's completely free (open source), and cross-platform. The documentation and community is also extremely good. I'd recommend you check out the gallery here:
http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?set_albumName=album07&option=com_gallery&Itemid=55&include=view_album.php
Ogre is officially supported for C++, but there are quite a few wrappers, including all the .NET languages, Python, Ruby, and (soon) BlitzMax [called "Flow", I think].