I program FPGAs professionally (Xilinx Zynq, VHDL). I agree that the tool's GUI is atrocious, the actual way to use it is to write everything in TCL scripts, and invoke the tools through a Makefile. I only open the GUI to look at timing issues or ask it for code templates.

I disagree with "HDL is software" though. It's not, it's even in the name: "hardware description language". Yes it's a text file with what looks a lot like regular code in it. However what's being decribed is how to connect boxes of logic together, and how to compute the output of the boxes from their inputs. There's no implicit program counter that's advancing from one line to the next.

It is (theoretically) possible to write these kind of things with a lot of abstraction, but every time you try that by using more advanced language features, you hit some bugs in the tool's implementation of the language. If you're lucky it'll tell you where you're doing undupported stuff. Often it'll crash. Sometimes it'll sythesize hardware that doesn't conform with the language spec.

Finally, FPGAs are simple only when you're looking at a bird's eye view (just like CPUs are simple when you're looking at a diagram with a few boxes saying "ALU", "Cache", "Registers"). The actual datasheets are thousands of pages long.

FPGAs are still useful though, their use case is "I need custom hardware and I don't have the volume to build an ASIC". For example, my application is a custom signal processing pipeline that's handling about 3.5 Gbit/s of streaming raw data. On a $40 chip.

I think my main point is that yes, the tooling is a pain to use, with heaps of bugs and bad language support. However a HDL is conceptually different from a software language and I'm not sure you can hide away the complexities of designing hardware behind "modern" language features.

For those suggesting diagram-based languages, go program something in LabView, you'll quickly understand why that's a bad idea (works for trivial designs, anything complex is an opaque mess of boxes and lines, unsearchable, and impossible to integrate with version control).