Indeed. It seems like we're finally seeing a smidgeon of movement in this direction lately as well. Lattice have been at least semi-friendly to people building OSS support for some of their FPGA's and now QuickLogic have come out with some explicit support[1] for OSS as well. And I have to admit, given that AMD have been at least a nugget more friendly to the OSS world over the years, I'm harboring a faint kernel of hope that Xilinx may move in this direction a bit as well, under their stewardship[2].

[1]: https://www.quicklogic.com/qorc/

[2]: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/xilinx-acquisition

I work on FPGAs professionally and it is hard for me to come up with many commercial applications for them outside of what they're currently used for.

What if FPGAs were $1 each, would that change it for you?

The problem is getting data to/from the FPGA, which imposes unavoidable latency. If you want to do this fast it can't be done cheaply because it requires too much silicon. Aside from simulation type tasks, the tasks best suited for FPGAs are streaming tasks for this reason since once you've started streaming data through the FPGA you don't need to worry about latency too much.