I understand how frustrated you are; I have been in your shoes (and likely will be in the future). But I don’t think it’s fair to blame pmG and exonerate every other 3d software company. I use Maya a great deal and many people experience display issues with it; the first sticky in the Maya forum on this site has a 26-page thread about display problems. Even Autodesk, with its massive size and resources, has a lot of trouble nailing down OpenGL issues. In fact, Autodesk refuses to officially support consumer level video cards for Maya… so if you run into a display problem and aren’t using a high-end Quadro or FirePro card, they can’t (or won’t) do anything about it.
So in that respect, the fact that messiah runs so well on so many cheap, consumer-level gaming cards is commendable. The flickering and interface issues have been present for years and I’ve no idea who’s to blame. Hopefully pmG can figure it out soon – or at the very least, perhaps someone from the community can offer a suggestion that will help you out.
Did you email pmG support about your problem? I can attest that Modo has huge flickering problems and will crash a lot whenever I move or attempt to modify a part of the interface. I’ve emailed Luxology repeatedly with the problems I’m having and my system spec details. I have yet to get a response. messiah runs smoothly on my computer with no flickering, etc. And I have a mobile gfx that is very low-end (which Modo apparently doesn’t like!