You are right about the tools being difficult to master. I've been doing some work with FPGAs lately, and I see one big problem. The hardware is really cool. Bu

You are right about the tools being difficult to master. I've been doing some work with FPGAs lately, and I see one big problem. The hardware is really cool. But the software is horrible. I'm working with Altera tools. To do any work, I need to download about 5Gb of stuff. The IDE is painfully slow, badly designed, and crashes about once every hour. Everything is closed-source. Basically, the development process is at least a decade behind that for software work. Xilinx tools are also closed (don't know if they are as unusable though). I think that if one of the FPGA companies opened up their toolkit, they could win big. But they are too worried about their proprietary routing algorithms to do that.