Thanks for those links, the technique looks very interesting 😀
The problem with pseudo-instancing in Neo is the dependency on GL immediate mode render functions which are not available in GL>=3.0 core profiles and GLES. Yes, there are drivers that implement GL<3.0 in their driver (compatibility profile) but I don't think that this should be our target. Our target is using the most current technology to the extend in which it is compatible enough with most hardware. Currently that is OpenGL 3.x-4.x and GLES2 in many (if not all) cases.
I think the idea of using immediate mode functionality to use modern techniques is very interesting even if we will not use it like they described. Our goal currently is the default approach using hardware instancing. There are still enough problems to solve before this can happen 😀
There are some questions to be answered like "When should instancing be used?" or "How can we apply visibility tests?", "How many instances should be in one batch?" etc.