I agree that it's annoying how complex 'simple' examples are but am not sure the OpenGL standard is the right place to inject a beginner friendly interface. A lot of the complexity like managing buffers and graphics memory are a result of the more capable 3D hardware we have today. A better thing to do would be to have a nice beginning library built on top of OpenGL and which abstracts away a lot of the gory hardware details to expose a simpler immediate mode style or scene graph interface.