It seems no one has mentioned the long peaks fiasco yet, which is an important part of understanding OpenGL history and the committee(s) in charge of the standard:
TL;DR: This is not the first time people are pissed at OpenGL. Last time when industry, developers, etc were sick and tired, around 2006-2007, and it was decided to do something about the API, an effort was initiated. Once the work was close to finishing, those who had seen the glimpse of this yet-to-be-released API were excited and were eagerly waiting for the release. Then the OpenGL committee vanished from the scene for a year or so, and when it re-appeared, it released the same old shitty API with a handful of function calls on top of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Longs_Peak_and_OpenGL_3....
TL;DR: This is not the first time people are pissed at OpenGL. Last time when industry, developers, etc were sick and tired, around 2006-2007, and it was decided to do something about the API, an effort was initiated. Once the work was close to finishing, those who had seen the glimpse of this yet-to-be-released API were excited and were eagerly waiting for the release. Then the OpenGL committee vanished from the scene for a year or so, and when it re-appeared, it released the same old shitty API with a handful of function calls on top of that.