Thank you for your explanation. I guess your last point is why I thought I was missing something: > None of the above are likely to apply to hobbyists, so most

Thank you for your explanation. I guess your last point is why I thought I was missing something: > None of the above are likely to apply to hobbyists, so most > hobbyists who are developing for FPGAs are likely doing so > just because they find it very interesting. I see posts on HackerDay about FPGAs and think: "What am I missing?". I build robots as part of a hobby and was wondering where on earth they fit into that pipeline. Most of the things I build are either already solved within a single chip, or are easily solved with the addition of a small micro. Developing something using a HDL would be too extreme, even for me. One thing that I think might be of interest in the future is when the cell count is such that we can process large neural networks, although I suspect they might always lag behind GPUs and/or TPUs.