Learning an HDL isn't that hard. But it's a very small part of the overall flow for real development, and arguably it's one of the easier parts anyway... That's

Learning an HDL isn't that hard. But it's a very small part of the overall flow for real development, and arguably it's one of the easier parts anyway... That's sort of the "problem", more or less. Even very well-oiled products like the Amazon F1 and Intel's new acceleration cards are pretty non-trivial to use unless you're an experienced engineer, and they clearly spent a lot of time polishing off the roughest edges to make it as approachable as possible. Amazon more or less paid a team of seriously experienced people to make the whole flow as painless as possible (including a pretty good software SDK, and a lot of tooling around Vivado), and it's still non-trivial! Some of the ARM/FPGA combos are a lot more approachable overall, but the tooling, BSPs etc are normally huge pains the moment you want to get creative, and the SDKs are comparatively worse, vs the "high end" ones listed above, in my opinion. Normally I just end up replacing them with my own Linux BSP, more or less, if I need the actual host side. A really annoying aspect of all this though is that most kits which could offer features like high-speed peripherials (PCIe, etc) are pretty expensive for hobbyist developers to acquire and use, so there's certainly a bit of a self-fulfilling-prophecy going on here.