FPGA stuff isn't hard to pick up at all. At least to do basic stuff. (I got as far as building my own HDMI-outputting simple video chip with a character genera

FPGA stuff isn't hard to pick up at all. At least to do basic stuff. (I got as far as building my own HDMI-outputting simple video chip with a character generator, tied to a RISC-V processor, addressing SRAM, booting a primitive OS. But I kinda fizzled out after that when I ran into SD card interfacing)