[ua709]

Schools can join the AMD University Program and get back to where they were, and more. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html

As for hobbyists, in the world of $0.03 microcontrollers, strong competition on the low end from Chinese manufacturers, and where few people learn HDLs, is NRE money in the hobby market really money well spent?

I'm a HW designer and even I use microcontrollers now for most things, but not everything, because it's usually cheaper and faster.

With semiconductor prices coming down as far as they have I think the world has probably fundamentally changed for FPGAs and the niche they occupied is shrinking fast.