Perhaps there is some truth in your assessment but I think the lack of pressure on tool support is more related to the lack of industry-grade alternatives, more

Perhaps there is some truth in your assessment but I think the lack of pressure on tool support is more related to the lack of industry-grade alternatives, more so than HDL teams clinging on to a desire of developing like it's 1989. The reality is that nowadays HDL teams are composed of a lot of people with CS and CE background, who are obviously aware of sane development processes and practices. You will find that a lot of people simply use their text editor of choice and then just use the vendor's tool whenever absolutely necessary with a 7 foot pole (from a script or CLI if possible). The problem again (in my very speculative opinion) is that you have a very limited set of vendors who have a complete lock down on their hardware. Imagine a world without gcc or llvm and only Intel or AMD could provide you with a compiler. Imagine also that they would provide you with this compiler for free, such that their business model was entirely based on them selling their CPU's. How much pressure would they have in providing a high quality toolchain? It's not like their customers are gonna run away to a non existent competition they still need to buy CPU's and they would be stuck with their 'barely works' toolchain. You can see the difference if you compare FPGA vendor software with HDL simulation software. Simulators are in the business of selling you software so they have pressure to actually deliver quality software. FPGA vendors are in the business of selling _silicon_ (@saagarjha) so they pretty much see the toolchain as an operational cost.