Im still alive and working on blender. Just wanted to give an update. Build optimizations really didn't help with the speed (as you can see in the video I made that andyfrommk posted). I've been writing an opengl -> opengles wrapper using the code the pocketblender author shared with me. I managed to get it to build, but many functions are missing and I've implemented them with pseudo code. So the results are strange at best. The short story is the interface runs better but segfaults randomly. Additionally not everything renders in the interface. Its taken this long to get a working build since I started implementing the opengles wrapper, but its actually looking promising. I will post another video as soon as I finish all the wrapper functions. Im having to learn opengl(es) on demand as I go along, so the road is long. If anyone has some expertise and thinks they can help me fill in some of these functions, please let me know.