There's a distinction on the job market between researcher and programmer. The question is, which one of these you plan to be? The job market for talented programmers is growing (and I'm buying Rao's arguments on developeronomics), although I don't think there's a significantly large market for talented researchers.

More seriously: courses don't limit career options. Lack of talent or social skills do. Bioinformatics from programmers point of view is a field as many others - cool stuff is cutting edge stuff (think big data, network analysis, stochastic modelling and similar). One of my colleagues (bioinformatician) moved to investment fund just after his first postdoc - he was hired for his programming skills in developing computational models.

And finally, have you asked te same question on other forums, preferably more general than this one? Consensus methods are bioinformatics' bread and butter ;).

I think you'll find that the skills you gain from analyzing biological data sets, especially NGS data to be very translational. It is very common for me to find resources related to economic modeling, sociological data, benchmarking networks..etc when searching for information on an analytical method. At the end of the day, we all become data scientists.

It all really depends on what you end up doing as a Master's project to be honest. I would hazard that most bioinformaticians tend to come from a background in life sciences instead of computer science, so our career paths may not be as applicable.

Instead of taking a big step try to join as a intern where they do bioinformatics.

I would suggest you take a course of data mining or machine learning where your specialization can be using biological data. This gives you a wide scope for developing methods in bioinformatics and also analyzing data. Plus, it does not restrict you to bioinformatics and you can extend to work in various other fields as well, wherever there is large data.

It depends on the course curriculum that is offered as part of your masters. If the program is clearly offered as Bioinformatics, then may be you are limited to studying only courses in data processing (NGS, array, etc....)... If you take a program in Computational Biology, then you would study a wide range of other things!