Why not both? A low level API where you create a context, then give it [clear|cipher]text and it gives you [cipher|clear]text, and and API that builds on top of it to provide socket communication? I don't see why the two are mutually exclusive. Now, your complaint about event loop integration is very valid. You should be able to use select/epoll/kqueue/etc. on TLS sockets without having to worry about what your libssl is doing.
I wrote exactly one program that uses libssl in C directly. It is a special-purpose web server that can serve files or stream content over an HTTPS connection [1]. It was a huge pain to get my event loop to play nice with TLS because TLS does more reads/writes where a plain HTTP connection would do just reads or just writes. I also had to enable various non-defaults (SSL_MODE_ENABLE_PARTIAL_WRITE | SSL_MODE_RELEASE_BUFFERS) to get it to behave more like a regular socket. Having a more standard way to support stuff like this would be great, and it does exist in other places. For example, Python wraps libssl in such a way that you can just wrap a plain socket into a TLS socket, and it pretty much just works. It'd be great if stuff like this existed at a lower level where this new API seems to live.
I wrote exactly one program that uses libssl in C directly. It is a special-purpose web server that can serve files or stream content over an HTTPS connection [1]. It was a huge pain to get my event loop to play nice with TLS because TLS does more reads/writes where a plain HTTP connection would do just reads or just writes. I also had to enable various non-defaults (SSL_MODE_ENABLE_PARTIAL_WRITE | SSL_MODE_RELEASE_BUFFERS) to get it to behave more like a regular socket. Having a more standard way to support stuff like this would be great, and it does exist in other places. For example, Python wraps libssl in such a way that you can just wrap a plain socket into a TLS socket, and it pretty much just works. It'd be great if stuff like this existed at a lower level where this new API seems to live.
[1] https://github.com/ipartola/hawkeye