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the development environment UIs look like a toddler was given access to VB6

But does anyone really use the GUI? I was always under the impression nobody, including Xilinx, really cared about the GUI because most commercial projects probably did things headless, invoking the toolchain directly. In other words, it wasn't really meant to be a full time development environment like an IDE.

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You can use it batch or in GUI mode. The vivado gui is very good for design visualisation and interactive feedback, but as it's tcl driven you can run headless for regular builds/ regressions. Personally I use the GUI more often than not.

The toolchain has gotten so gnarly at this point that the only way to build a batch version of it is to launch the GUI, build a project and mine what the toolchain does from the log.

This is completely false. The toolchain is now tcl driven, and all commands are fully documented in programming guide: https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xili...

Basically: synth_design; place_design; route_design; write_bitstream

What could be more straight forward and transparent than that?

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