The truth is a tiny amount on top could significantly reduce the boilerplate for true beginners: a spec defined trivial fragment and vertex shader that has an a

The truth is a tiny amount on top could significantly reduce the boilerplate for true beginners: a spec defined trivial fragment and vertex shader that has an associated glBindDefaultShaders() would already go a long way. The truth is that it doesn't really make sense to make the "render one triangle" easier since it only makes sense to use OpenGL if you are going to go deep on how it works, so accelerating the first two days down to one day isn't going to make a huge impact on the learning curve (compared with other apis where cutting the first two days to one would be a huge deal).