i think what you mean here is, we need a better IDE for the fpga world.
building a simple hardware dev board is a straightforward exercise.
building an IDE that lets a novice do anything useful on an fpga, outside of a very basic state machine, is an entirely different problem in both scope and structure.
The vast majority of HDL blocks you'd need to make such a thing more useful than a $4 microcontroller are closed source, nontrivial to build, and require careful thought in terms of integrating them into a workable system, not to mention very specific and application dependent PHYs: Things like HDMI, ethernet, USB, etc.
I think what most people would prefer is a fast general purpose CPU with pluggable, low-latency memory mapped peripherals without the hassle of having to know linux systems programming to make it work.
> building a simple hardware dev board is a straightforward exercise.
I would argue that you can make your own microcontroller dev board easily enough too. An RP2040 or similar, a USB programmer, some kind of voltage converter, etc.
The joy that Arduino bright to microprocessors was that it was a device that was useful for a lot of projects straight out of the box, accessible to those with only high school knowledge of circuits or programming.
building a simple hardware dev board is a straightforward exercise.
building an IDE that lets a novice do anything useful on an fpga, outside of a very basic state machine, is an entirely different problem in both scope and structure.
The vast majority of HDL blocks you'd need to make such a thing more useful than a $4 microcontroller are closed source, nontrivial to build, and require careful thought in terms of integrating them into a workable system, not to mention very specific and application dependent PHYs: Things like HDMI, ethernet, USB, etc.
I think what most people would prefer is a fast general purpose CPU with pluggable, low-latency memory mapped peripherals without the hassle of having to know linux systems programming to make it work.