Gowin and Efinix's tools are extremely spartan compared to Vivado or Quartus: they're pretty much straight HDL to bitstream compilers. There's also a FOSS imple

Gowin and Efinix's tools are extremely spartan compared to Vivado or Quartus: they're pretty much straight HDL to bitstream compilers. There's also a FOSS implementation flow available for the Gowin chips (but I haven't used it.) HDL isn't getting any easier, though, and that's where most of the complexity is.