Ask HN's FPGA users: FPGA tool woes & wants?

(From two guys building a webapp for FPGA users)

Any fellow FPGA users on HN? If you don't mind taking a moment to share your thoughts; it'll be really helpful!

We'd love to hear about: - what you dislike about existing FPGA tools - what you'd want in FPGA tools; and - whether we're building would be useful

Here's our take: 1) Dislikes: - Being forced to choose a specific FPGA before compilation(synthesis, place-and-route etc.) when I don't even know which FPGA suits my application. - Installing, maintaining, upgrading bulky software tools on local PCs. - Taking weeks/months to learn a particular tool from just one FPGA vendor. 2) Wants: - Ways to automatically match an FPGA app to the right FPGAs. - in terms of speed, size, power, etc. - FPGA tools hosted and updated somewhere else. - A single user interface that translates user inputs for all vendors' FPGA tools.

Existing tools don't seem to do these things, so we started building a webapp with the above features.

Ran the idea by the folks at YC and they had questions about how useful our webapp would be after the FPGA programming files are generated and the user needs to test on real hardware. (Answer: Not very; our webapp will just ensure that the user ends up buying and using the most suitable hardware)

Beta site: http://www.plunify.com

Thanks for reading; looking forward to your comments!