[higherpurpose]

I hope Khronos focuses on making OpenGL ES the true "next-gen gaming API" as a clean departure from the full OpenGL, and they also get a chance to "rewrite", perhaps in a more efficient manner, the features they've already written for OpenGL.

In the meantime they can continue improving OpenGL, too, but without focusing too much on it, and just kind of let it deprecate itself, as OpenGL ES sits on billions of devices and developers develop only for it and not for the full OpenGL anymore.

[yoklov]

OpenGL ES isn't really a departure from OpenGL, and most of the problems with OpenGL (all the ones mentioned here, I believe) apply to OpenGL ES.

OpenGL ES isn't trying to be a clean break. It's just a stripped down version of the given version suitable for embedded environments (e.g. OpenGL ES 2 is a stripped down version of OpenGL 2.0, ES3 => 3.0, ...).

[bostik]

GLES also introduces a logical split between memory management (buffers, surfaces) and rendering/acceleration.

The traditional OpenGL drivers have everything in a single near-monolithic bundle. Low-level memory management is tightly coupled with the high-level 3D primitives and the graphics driver implementation.

With OpenGL ES, the actual buffer and surface management has been split into EGL. GLES has the "useful" GL implementation.

My understanding is quite limited, as the only reason I know about this is that I have been involved in integrating Wayland into embedded systems.