Something like Three.JS has some serious weaknesses: one of which is the obsessive object orientation, which makes it essentially impossible to share a program and VBO between draws. More objects -> even worse overhead.

Honestly, I think that it's necessary to expose people to something like OpenGL, because it at least somewhat communicates the real costs of operations. I don't think it's exactly a marketing problem so much as a practicality problem. If you want to ship something which Three.JS can render with decent performance, it's a good tradeoff. If your abstraction prevents you from implementing what you want, it's an unacceptable tradeoff.