I argued it in the second quote: "The hard word is mapping onto gates/LUTs". It doesn't matter whether its gates or FPGA luts, the work is the same.

I never argued anything regarding proprietary vs opensource tools. I love opensource tools and appreciate projects such as FIRRTL, Symbiflow, Yosys, Chisel, Clash, etc have amazing potential. Having access to the FPGA vendors low-level abstractions enables the broader use and development of these tools, which is important. My point was only that gates/LUTs are the fundamental building blocks of all digital computing. They are not easily abstractable, and to say that FPGAs have the wrong abstraction is not the best way to look at the problem. FPGAs aren't going to fundamentally change, they aren't going to evolve from FPGA : GPFPGA (to answer the author's analogy). But, tools can always be improved and make FPGA design more accessible.