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When you look at how much nicer the programming experience is for something like Metal it’s hard to blame them.

Think I’d prefer to write 3 backends for Metal level complexity APIs than a single one targeting Vulkan.

Yes, so much this. It’s like someone looked at OpenGL and said, “Hey, how can we take all the hard, ugly, terrible parts of OpenGL and throw out all the nice, useful parts?” And that became Vulkan. I’ve written code for OpenGL since the 1.0 days. These days I do Metal. I wanted to check out what it would take to port something to Vulkan. I couldn’t make it through the basic Vulkan tutorial of putting a single triangle on the screen. It was too long, and required too many really low-level things. It felt almost like you needed to write your own memory allocator to use it properly. It was nuts.

Worse part is that Khronos doesn't seem to get it, as with OpenGL, they expect the community to come up with ways to fix it.

There are some steps into that direction with LunarG SDK efforts, NVidia was the one coming up with C++ bindings, but that is mostly it.

Nothing as nice out of the box as the proprietary APIs.

A guy from a studio I know has best described it, as one needs to be a graphics developer and a device driver expert to properly code against Vulkan.

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