[UncleOxidant]

> i could tell you more but it would just spike my blood pressure after 6 months of not having to deal with that mess.

There was a time when I could've transitioned to FPGA development and I was pretty keen to do so. But after using (fighting with) Xilinx's tools and watching other people who were deeper into the FPGA side wage similar wars I decided it just wasn't worth it. That it would be better just to stay on the software side of things where the tools are mostly open source and so much better. In FPGA development you just don't have any control over the backend tools - fortunately there are a lot of front-end simulation tools like Verilator that are open source and some limited backend tools like Yosys are open source. Hopefully open source will continue to make inroads, but it's slow going.