[LeifCarrotson]

As someone who has little experience with FPGAs beyond some experiments with a Spartan-6 dev board that mostly involved learning to write VHDL and building a minimal CPU, I found the simulator to be of limited use. My tiny projects were small enough that the education simulator was plenty fast. It was nice when I didn't have the board available, and occasionally, the logic analyzer was useful when I didn't understand what my code was doing to a data structure. But usually, it was just a lot easier to simply flash the board and run the thing.

What's the use of a simulator when you can spin up an AWS instance and run your program on a real FPGA?

[krupan]

Simulations give you better controllability and better visibility. In other words, you can poke and prod every internal piece of the design in simulation land. In real hardware, not so easy.

That being said, you are far from alone as an FPGA developer in skipping sim and going straight to hardware. Tools like Xilinx's chipscope help with the visibility problem in real hardware too.