Part of why Lattice Semi has been so successful in recent years is they've broken the paradigm slightly in that their FPGAs are much most cost-effective, while still coming with all of the things we expect of FPGAs. Lots of high-speed IO, half decent software, and a pretty broad IP portfolio. Something like the Certus-NX comes in at ~$5 at the 17k LUT count, and Avant only ~$550 at the 600k LUT mark. That's almost a 1/4 or more of what the equivalent Xilinx or Altera device goes for. There's very little licensing cost too, which make them really appealing. I see them going into so many designs now because they can scale. You'd have to be making 100Ks+ of boards to justify the ASIC expense when there's a commodity product like it.