[duskwuff]

> The bottom line is that the typical FPGA can only be programmed a fixed number of times

This is only true if the configuration is rewritten to flash every time the device is reconfigured, which would not be typical. Any design which depended on reconfiguring an FPGA frequently would reconfigure the device directly using JTAG or active serial programming, or would switch between multiple configurations in flash.

I personally have several FPGA development boards which I've reconfigured hundreds of times. There is effectively no limit to the number of times a device can be reconfigured; the configuration is stored in SRAM, which has no write limit.