[exmadscientist]

Dropping in a midsize MCU with 256kB of Flash just to program a single FPGA is not viable in a margin-constrained commercial product. It works great if it's already there, of course, but the applications I'm thinking of have been the ones where it isn't.

Not to mention there are many FPGA applications where one purpose of the FPGA is to avoid having software in the path. If software is only responsible for configuration load, it's better, but still can be a problem.