Comment by MisterTea

This is exactly it.

The FPGA situation is the same as the microcontroller situation before Arduino blew open the flood gates: byzantine proprietary software and libraries you have to pay for to unlock hard IP functionality less you from scratch develop it yourself which can be very difficult. The Arduino gave people a solid kit: Simple to install IDE that wraps up a text editor, tool chain and libraries with matching plug and play hardware.

Arduino took microcontrollers from esoteric hardware for EE's to mainstream "makers" - people who were not technically educated but wanted to makes things using technology. FPGA's need a solid foundation like that.

I briefly worked with FPGAs and was having a lot of fun but the software really ruined it for me. I forget the details but I was moving my web license of the Xilinx tools to my desktop from my laptop, it kept failing and I gave up.