Some contributors to the open hardware community (https://fossi-foundation.org/events/archive) can be followed on social media. See videos from FOSSI conferences and comments in these HN threads:

2023, "FPGA Dev Boards for $150 or Less", 80 comments, https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=38161215

2021, "FPGA dev board that's cheap, simple and supported by OSS toolchain", 70 comments, https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=25720531

Not an FPGA, but if you already have a recent Ryzen device, the AMD NPU might be worth a look, with Xilinx lineage and current AI/LLM market frenzy, https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=43671940

> The Versal AI Engine is the NPU. And the Ryzen CPUs NPU is almost exactly a Versal AI Engine IP block to the point that in the Linux kernel they share the same driver (amdxdna) and the reference material the kernel docs link to for the Ryzen NPUs is the Versal SoC's AI Engine architecture reference manual.

At one point, cheap ex-miner FPGAs were on eBay, https://hackaday.com/2020/12/10/a-xilinx-zynq-linux-fpga-boa.... The Zynq (Arm + Xilinx FPGA) dev board is around $200, https://www.avnet.com/americas/products/avnet-boards/avnet-b.... There was an M.2 Xilinx FPGA (PicoEVB) that conveniently fit into a laptop for portable development, but it's not sold anymore. PCIe FPGAs are used for DMA security testing, some of those boards are available, https://github.com/ufrisk/pcileech-fpga

No. It's not competitive. You'll spend previous time (which should be spent on prototyping an design) on solving bugs and writing infrastructure code. Reverse engineering has not been a viable effort for a long time now.

Need fundamentals of combinational and sequential logic, followed by perhaps a course on hardware/software interfacing to grok timing parameters like setup and hold time, propagation delay, fan in, fan out.

FPGAs can be developed using CAE-like systems or SystemVerilog, VHDL, or something modern like Veryl. Real FPGAs include acceleration blocks like DRAM, SRAM, CAM, shifters, ALU elements, and/or ARM cores.

At the end of the day though, the best teacher is to learn by doing and finding venues to ask questions.

Maybe try https://icestudio.io/