It's been a few years for me too, but I think the answer to why it is difficult is why a higher-level or more general language would be useful: it's all about o

It's been a few years for me too, but I think the answer to why it is difficult is why a higher-level or more general language would be useful: it's all about organizing your process to match the tooling available to you. When I spend a couple weeks every couple years in the Xilinx ISE, all my organization is done out-of-band in Excel and Emacs, I end up writing a lot in pseudocode before translating to VHDL. It's tempting to think I could write Java instead of pseudocode and have it just run.