And they work for RSA, who sells a commercial competitor to OpenSSL. They may have a financial disinterest in making OpenSSL easier to use, its not simply ego-stroking.
The problem with ossl is that horrid and old-school as the C API is (and the command line interface isn't much better), there is a HUGE amount of valuable code in it supporting tons of crypto algorithms and formats with very fast implementations and years and years of interoperability testing and hacks.