I got a Xilinx Spartan DEV board sitting in a drawer too. The board is great but Xilinx's tooling has negative value for me, so it'll stay there.
Tooling is 100% the thing keeping FPGAs back.
Tooling is 100% the thing keeping FPGAs back.
The big consumers of FPGAs don't care if the tooling is terrible, because they're coming from 80s development environments and practices and can afford to dedicate 50-person teams to the job function.
Smaller companies won't touch it because it's terrible, and the vendors won't improve it because there's no demonstrated market for improvements.
Or maybe the market economics work out, but are small relatively compared to the big players, so it moves glacially.