Yes, I think it's beautiful to try to apply software/computer science/statistical methods to a hardware field.
Making builds faster via parallelism, publishing <a href="http://www.plunify.com/reports.php>statistics</a>; for an application and like you said, having some intelligent ways of indicating errors are things that we're very enthusiastic about. And it's great to read that people actually want such features.
Testing instead of chip selection? I guess I'm too used to the word "testing" being used for actual hardware testing, but I can see how the change in phrasing might appeal more.
I see; instead of greasy marketing talk, we should emphasize technical data in order to win over our target customers--the engineers. Being engineers ourselves, this makes complete sense. I wonder how we can appeal to the "suits" too.
How we're currently presenting results is something like this: Here're all the FPGAs that we've tested your application on. These are the ones who met your frequency, size, power, and this is how much they cost.
For simulators, we're trying to see if providing the open source Icarus Verilog and GHDL with custom libraries might work for people.
Can I ask you about that flasher that you wrote sometime? Not at all familiar with how they work, but a universal USB-JTAG solution would be great.
Really appreciate your comments.