It would be pretty great, but I've actually never been able to get Vivado to work, despite having a license for the given board, I activate it and install everything, and sometimes it seems like it activates for some other system in the family instead of what I have, and I'm left with the cutest little silicon brick.

I got a couple iCE40 boards and fired up yosys/icestorm (never touched the [more feature complete, I'm sure] proprietary toolchain for these), instant satisfaction, and I was able to do exactly what I wanted (and on any host CPU architecture or operating system I wanted). The only limitations were a lack of big IO, rather small memory, limited system size.

Frankly I think Lattice should just hire a couple people endorsed by Clifford Wolf (since I know Clifford is a very busy dude) to package up his brilliant toolchain with a bow, fill in the desired analytical features, and ship it as the official iCE40 toolchain. Maybe they could try to get something similar going for their larger FPGAs (which are unrelated to the iCE40, which they got as part of an acquisition) as well.

Do they make any iCE40 boards like the PicoEVB? I wouldn't mind something that didn't sit inside an M.2 slot inside a laptop for my tinkering, but I do think it is an intriguing form factor. I know zero about any of these toolchains.