Essentially he's just whining that porting his project is difficult because the API doesn't have the more beginner friendly(but inefficient) drawing calls that used to be there. OpenGL ES is not designed to be beginner friendly, it's meant to give low-level access for high performance graphics. It's perfectly reasonable to use an abstraction layer on top of that for simple drawing, it's not that hard, and a quick google would probably find many projects that have done so.

Personally if your going for simple, and not performance, there are much better ways to design the api than glBegin(). So all those calls are the worst of both worlds, awkward, and slow.