[striking]

This could all be done by a single person. A very talented person, sure, but one person could do all of this.

I'm not certain about routing the DDR3 traces, but DIY soldering on a BGA chip isn't the absolute worst thing in the world, and VHDL/Verilog aren't that bad, especially when using the Xilinx tooling. A lot of that code is written for you (and you usually don't have to purchase IP cores... usually)

[revelation]

BGA soldering difficulty seems like somewhat of a persistent myth. Sure, it's difficult to get right if you want to solder a BGA as part of a production line and need to get 99.9% right or it becomes too costly.

But iPhone repair technicians and others are very blase about just using hot air guns and a ton of flux to solder all kinds of BGA chips, and they generally seem to work just fine.

Now DDR3 and USB3 routing is very annoying, but you generally just copy the reference design of the FPGA manufacturer and possibly adjust for your board layup.