It was not my intent to be discouraging towards the project, but rather than a frustration about a consistently misplaced attention from outsiders and science/research community.
But again, this notion of "outsiders" is very gatekeepy. There have been substaintial successes in using high-level programming models for hardware design.
The Google VCU paper explicitly mentions using such tools made them faster. All of these is enabled by people looking at problems with a fresh perspective
I don't have a horse in this race, and maybe the root comment came off as flippant and disparaging. But I'm not reading "outsiders" as being what you say "gatekeeping".
Maybe another perspective is that "outsiders" may not have the same view of the issue as experts in the field and may not (historically, in OP's experience) seem to want to work together with the experts to develop this view. Handwaving away complexities and not willing to get hands dirty is something I've seen as well so maybe I'm a bit more empathetic, but cold shoulders from "experts" towards newcomers is definitely a thing.
Both of which could help both sides - bring more depth to the fresh view of the "outsiders" and actually bring valuable freshness to the depth of the "experts".
"outsiders" can often bring a new perspective. There are many people who overlap both the hardware and software worlds (I consider myself one of them having started out in hardware and then moving over to the software side in EDA). Without those kinds of people you wouldn't have the kinds of EDA tools you have now.
> misplaced attention from outsiders and science/research community.
Come join the software side and work on the tools you want to see.
The Google VCU paper explicitly mentions using such tools made them faster. All of these is enabled by people looking at problems with a fresh perspective