FPGA's are extremely powerful, but the toolchain is absolute dog shit. Xilinx, shame on you. Intel, will you change anything here?

The compound problem of this in reality is that finding the right people who have the right strain of semi-insanity to do this really well, is very slim. And most of them are tied up with a massive salary from some aerospace company such as Raytheon, GE, Honeywell, or someone like Philips (building medical devices).

Add to that compile times of an hour or a day, and you have a glacial development cycle on your hands.