Have you noticed anybody else with better software and chips ? no ? maybe because it's extremely hard to to get to the level of ISE and the competitors ?
'get to the level' of ISE... I disagree. I do not want to build an IDE. I want an open toolchain, the thing that the ISE interface calls. There is some math in there that takes certain skills to implement, but I know several people who could do it if they had the layout of the chips.
MAYBE the reason there are no open toolchains 'on the level' of ISE and competitors is not because Xilinx has some amazing secret sauce and is instead because the whole industry is caustically secretive and horribly anti competition.
Well Quartus isn't bad. It will be interesting to see what Intel does with it. They have a history of open sourcing things other folks don't want to open source (like Graphics Drivers).