As far as building apkenv "with GLES2" and "without GLES2" is concerned:

OpenGL ES 1.x is NOT a subset of OpenGL ES 2.0, and therefore OpenGL ES 2.0 is NOT a superset of OpenGL ES 1.x. There is a nice diagram on the Maemo Wiki that shows the relationships between the different versions (note that OpenGL 2.0 on the Desktop is a superset of OpenGL 1.0 on the Desktop).

All of the games supported by apkenv that I know of are using the OpenGL ES 1.x APIs, and therefore only work if you build apkenv with OpenGL ES 1. Some newer games might be using Open GL ES 2.x (one indication for this is the symbol glUseProgram for example, or just look if it compiles against libGLESv2.so). For these games (once somebody writes a support module for them), you will need to build apkenv with GLES2 support, which does the necessary set-up, and binds the OpenGL ES 2 library functions.

Right now, the choice GLESv1 or GLESv2 is a compile-time choice, we could theoretically make it a run-time switch, but it would unnecessarily complicate the codebase at this stage, especially since we don't have any GLESv2 support modules yet

So a good advice: Don't spend your time trying to make GLESv2 work (except if you are specifically working on a module). We can always fix that later once a support module is available. The time is better spent (as Bundyo said) making new modules and figuring out the library loading order for .apks with multiple shared libraries.