I wasn't. I can understand getting rid of immediate mode; as jwz demonstrated it's not that hard to rewrite glBegin/glVertex code to use vertex buffers. But 2.0 has an absurdly steep learning curve if this tutorial is accurate: http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/opengl/open.... Multiple custom shaders to draw a single triangle, really?

The first hurdle is a little steep, yes. You need a shader to project your points, and a shader to texture your triangles.

But once you have those, it can scale to far more triangles.

Thing is without shaders it's still fixed-function, wich is bad.

It's common for hardware that supports the newer version to have a driver to support the older versions as well, though. Sort of just like the article did, but faking fixed function hardware using programmable hardware.