From the other thread you provided some output from running mpv, seemingly on 10.6.8, both x11 and cocoa versions. The x11 one's log specifies a missing ARB extension, so it is likely whatever OpenGL driver/libs you were using doesn't have that extension, and the x11 opengl driver requires it.
I will look at the code to see how that extension is used. Last time I looked, it seemed to require several extensions that may or may not have been completely necessary (and just fail if they aren't all present). If that particular one is used, we might modify the driver to not use it. If that is the case, I could do all that even on my Tiger machine, since it is just in the SDL2 video driver.
From what I know (and I may be wrong), opengl context profiles are important for having multiple drawing environments at the same time, so possibly when more than one window is used, or, if you are doing two different kinds of drawing to the same window. We might be able to work around this, or do it in a different way.
The non-x11 one seems to quit early in the video driver init, and there is no other useful messages.
The video drivers in SDL2 tend to be very conservative, and will just give up and quit if they find (or don't find) ANYTHING outside of what they expect.
Like x11 and the ARB extension, the cocoa driver may be checking and failing for something that isn't completely necessary (or could be worked around). It wouldn't be the same exact thing, as that is a GLX extension which is part of x11, but there's a high chance it is something related.
One final note, since that is GLX, it is probably just the opengl driver implementation (specifically the x11 interface to it), and not something the card itself doesn't support.