As a autodidact with a focus on analogue circuits and experience in microcontroller stuff the thing that always threw me off aboit FPGAs is that there was never a real oh-don’t-mind-I-am-just-looking kind of FPGA environment.

When I started with MCUs I started with an arduino. The thing it did for me was to give me a feeling when to use a microcontroller and when to use something else entirely.

Of course the level of control I had with an arduino was far from optimal, but it worked out of the box and guided me into the subject (a bit like a childrens bicycle: neither fast nor special, but helps in avoiding pain and frustration for the learner).

I wished I had this kind of thing in an affordable fpga way. Simple enough to get me hooked, with examples and good sane defaults etc.

This is what mainstream means: idiots like me who didn’t get a formal education on the subject but want to try things out.