This is a good question, and if you look a few posts up I started this comment tree by addressing it:
> if we compare the massive number of newly written OpenGL ES applications to all the old OpenGL 1.x fixed pipeline apps, the latter seem insignificant.
It was a design judgment they made and I think it was the right one.
> by reimplementing the old API calls in 3 days
JWZ did not produce a complete production-quality set of OpenGL 1.x compatibility APIs in 3 days. I'm going to guess without looking at his code that he didn't even write regression tests for the calls that he did implement.
What JWZ did was 3 days of possibly great coding, but that's only a tiny part of what needs to be done to ship new APIs in something like OpenGL.
> if we compare the massive number of newly written OpenGL ES applications to all the old OpenGL 1.x fixed pipeline apps, the latter seem insignificant.
It was a design judgment they made and I think it was the right one.
> by reimplementing the old API calls in 3 days
JWZ did not produce a complete production-quality set of OpenGL 1.x compatibility APIs in 3 days. I'm going to guess without looking at his code that he didn't even write regression tests for the calls that he did implement.
What JWZ did was 3 days of possibly great coding, but that's only a tiny part of what needs to be done to ship new APIs in something like OpenGL.