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The sea change will come when someone makes an FPGA that's an order of magnitude easier to program.

I think it's not as much a matter of making an FPGA that would be easier to program as it is a matter of coming up with an order-of-magnitude of improvement in programming techniques. What you're demanding is not far removed from saying that better programming models require improved transistors.

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That would be true if FPGAs were just arrays of undifferentiated transistors, but that's far from reality. FPGAs have DSP blocks, embedded memories, and other hardware elements that make a big difference in how they are programmed. It's not ridiculous to postulate that a hypothetical order-of-magnitude-better FPGA programming environment might benefit from or require hardware changes.

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