My understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong!) is that it's pretty easy to burn out FPGAs, electrically, in a way that it's not particularly trivial to

My understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong!) is that it's pretty easy to burn out FPGAs, electrically, in a way that it's not particularly trivial to do with other sorts of circuitry. So one downside of exposing your bitstreams is people are going to blow things up and demand new chips.