Seriously, consider the following example. I have a 600MHz laptop.
Not a high-end machine these days, but by no means a paperweight yet. There are *many* machines on the market of similar or lower specs that people are happily using, including for playing games. Heck, I can still run Warcraft 3 on it (640x480, low detail), and that's in full 3D.
Anyway: a very basic test of displaying a full screen background image in a loop and moving a smaller sprite around on it worked at about 500 FPS on that machine using the the original BlitzBasic.
With the BlitzMax Win32 Beta, a very similar test program gave me 5 FPS with the videodrivers that were installed automatically with Win2K.
After upgrading to the latest drivers directly from compaq (the manufacturer), that actually *dropped* to 0.2 FPS.
Yes. That's a between a hundred to a whopping two-and-a-half-thousand times slower than the DirectX equivalent using the same hardware, same OS depending on the drivers used.
Now imagine having to explain to a non-techie customer that yes, while their computer is good enough to play Warcraft 3, your 2D pacman or tetris game takes 5 seconds to render each frame?
Isn't the fairly obvious answer to this to write the Mac version of your game in BlitzMax then port it to Win32 using B3D? It's one thing for Id to use OpenGL, knowing that their reputation is such that people who want to play their games will (i) have high(er) end rigs and (ii) be comfortable getting their drivers in order, but wouldn't you have to be a bit of a spanner to use OGL for shareware aimed at PC people who typically own weaker machines and who think that updating drivers is some sort of witchcraft?