[ZirconiumX]

> There are no plucky garage shops or "wise crowds" making FPGA tools that are even in the same galaxy as ISE or Vivado.

Symbiotic EDA comes to mind. However, I would argue they don't need to be great, just good.

I don't have a copy of Vivado to hand (I have an Altera dev board instead), but I can take PicoSoC with Yosys/nextpnr and have a bitstream in about a minute. If I try the same task in Quartus, that takes about five minutes. Producing a (relatively) inefficient bitstream actually speeds up the compile/run cycle in that scenario.

If the design meets timing, which is often decided by external factors, any extra time spend trying to make the design "better" is wasted time.