Based on my limited experience playing with FPGA dev tools and boards as a hobbyist, this is my experience as well. Not only is there a huge learning curve --

Based on my limited experience playing with FPGA dev tools and boards as a hobbyist, this is my experience as well. Not only is there a huge learning curve -- some of it is necessary (you are essentially doing concurrent programming), but some of it is the arbitrary way these proprietary tools work. As a complete beginner it's bad enough trying to get a very simple "divide the clock down to flash a LED on the dev board at 1 Hz", it's a whole additional thing to try to figure out "How do I edit the code in my favorite text editor instead of this stupid Windows IDE, and how can I invoke the build tools from make?"