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They tried with OpenGL 3, but then it took them years and the plan were scrapped. ( That is when Microsoft brings DirectX 9 to the table, which is well designed and much more usable then OpenGL ). They restarted development a few years ago to clean up the mess.

The main reason why OpenGL did not get a restart were because of pressures from CAD and 3D Modelling Industry.

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The cynical view is that having two standards, one consumer and one pro, lets graphics companies ship the same chips, but charge 10x as much for the pro version with a couple driver tweaks. If the consumer games were written against the pro standard (requiring pro support in the consumer cards), how would they justify the pro line?

Why is that community (CAD/3d-modelling) even sitting at the table?

These modern GPUs are very generalized hardware now. Their drivers are "simulating" all kinds of features. Its a bit like OSS vs ALSA. They should just make the GPU a standard compiler target, and offer only the bare minimum (video-mode-setting) at the driver level.

Let the game industry write/design their own API on top. Let the CAD community do the same for their usecases. I know, with Mesa, this is kind of the setup. Except mesa isnt executed by the gpu: it runs on the CPU, and from there it executes code on the GPU.

Wouldnt it be much nicer if GPUs just behaved like CPUs? They are just optimized for different types of proccesing. Thats the interesting end-game: could the CPU be optional?

GPUs still have a ton of performance-critical fixed function units, and actually recently gained a new category of fixed-function unit (tesselation). OpenCL cannot replace OpenGL or D3D.

And the CAD/DCC market gets a say because they pay 10-100x more per seat than consumers.