Comment by modeless

Focusing on reducing driver overhead is the right way forward. If driver overhead is minimized, so that OpenGL is as thin a layer as possible over the real hardware, then changing the API becomes trivial: you can just wrap OpenGL and expose any API you want on top. Then, if someone writes a popular API wrapper, Khronos can take that API and standardize it as the next version of OpenGL, no design-by-committee required.