The problem is that I am not, so the build I've made is invalid for both 10.2 and 10.3

I'm working with Gerard on this. Having to be 10.3 specific should really not be necessary unless there is really something funky going on deep in the bowels of JOGL and its native renderer. Once you get a handle to a window - you should be able to get a GL context and just render.
I think it has more to do with the java update (for both 10.2 and 10.3). All my gl4java apps broke with the update so I was hoping jogl would be better. Both API's crash inside the native layer, so maybe they both suffer from the same problem.