The SoC builder you describe might be the MiSTer project for console hardware emulation. But even then, the number of people who develop verilog for that projec

The SoC builder you describe might be the MiSTer project for console hardware emulation. But even then, the number of people who develop verilog for that project is rather tiny. However, it's the first platform that has gotten me, a long time software developer, to really look into how it works. As in, I've been working through verilog tutorials, etc. and formulating a project to build on it. Compare to when I first bought a Xilinx FPGA dev board some 20 years ago, I found that I had no idea what to do with it, and there were not many resources to learn from compared to today. I don't think it's going to be mainstream soon, but there's definitely been some progress.