I'm very familiar with the state of the market. I like Sparkfun, but it's not batteries included. You run into the first major roadblock before you've started:

I'm very familiar with the state of the market. I like Sparkfun, but it's not batteries included. You run into the first major roadblock before you've started: "Please Note: If you haven't worked with Alchitry boards before, you will need to head over to their website to get set up and running before continuing with this tutorial." ... and you're down a rabbithole. Next, it splits on Cu versus Au boards. And by the end, it looks like I have a blinking LED. And I need to spend over $100 to get started. $100 is okay if I knew there was a good, frictionless pathway to the end. But in this case, I don't. It's gluing a half-dozen pieces together, and my experience is that 75% of the time, the kit ends up with some bug along the way, and lands in a drawer. The places I listed JUST WORK. That's a big difference. It's also important it feed into something. Half the time, companies will invent their own programming language, environment, or something, and at the end, we're at a dead end. I've never heard of Lucid. If I were doing an FPGA project, I'd start with VHDL or Verilog and standard tools. And clicking through, many of the tools used in this tutorial are now several layers obsoleted. That's more-or-less the state of most things.