The toolchain for a 7400 series project is very different from an FPGA. That's a bit obvious of course, but compare them... With an FPGA you have a giant propri

The toolchain for a 7400 series project is very different from an FPGA. That's a bit obvious of course, but compare them... With an FPGA you have a giant proprietary software package, with some incredibly powerful tools at your disposal. They're damn useful, and they're fast, but the focus is on learning how to describe your design to Xilinx ISE or whatever, and you have to learn the software so you can use its testbench facilities to validate your design, etc. With discrete logic, the design can be done on paper and with standard EDA tools, and you can prototype it and test and build it on your workbench, and all the signals are exposed so you can inject and probe signals with standard test equipment. I like the discrete logic approach because it feels more tangible and it's fun from an electronics tinkering perspective. But the FPGA method is for sure gonna be faster and smaller and cheaper, you just have to do all the work in software. Depends on the experience you want in your hobby project, I guess. :)