If you want to learn FPGAs, don't let tools get in the way of learning. Stick to Altera/Intel if for only 1 reason: Signaltap.
SignalTap is the single best tool you can get for getting somewhere in your FPGA journey, primarily if you ever plan on interfacing with hardware or ICs outside your FPGA. That is what FPGAs are designed for, anyway. It's like superman x-ray vision for your bugs.
I would recommend not using the open source tools with ice40 if only because there is no equivalent of SignalTap. Imagine having no gdb, no printf debugging, and all you have is 2 LEDs. Don't waste your time. Sure, Quartus can be annoying sometimes, but don't get distracted on tooling when you are trying to get your PS/2 keyboard or mouse interface working. Or check how many pixels your VGA horizontal back porch is, even though you think you wrote the verilog correctly.
With Signaltap you cook in a highly configurable logic analyzer into the design, and you can include any IO pin, bus internal register, or state machine.
It's one thing to play around in the simulator and test bench your own code, but that's rarely where the issues come up. Nothing beats actually analyzing your own design and external interfaces, warts and all, to see down to the exact clock cycle where something happened.
By the way, Xilinx does have something similar as an ILA, but it's not nearly as good, and the 7 series compilation times are not gonna be as fast as the cyclone IV.