I think a high level HDL would be great. C really isn't a good starting point because as you said it doesn't really fit the parallel hardware paradigm. The existing tools that do this feel like they're trying to shoehorn C into this application and it doesn't work too well, because of all the extra information you need to synthesize hardware, e.g. should every iteration of this loop happen simultaneously, or are you making a shift register?

Something that started with a Verilog/VHDL paradigm but provided higher level abstrations would be nice, a good analogy would be something like how Python is to C.