Part of the problem that I sense in the embedded systems world is that there is often huge differences in philosophical outlooks and development perspectives. In that, many in that world want to always be in the nuts and bolts of everything. For me, the perspective is to always be as high-level as possible when you can get away with it, leaving FPGAs and real-time OSs for things that actually need to be on an FPGA or real-time. The problem with this is that there are not very many who can bridge the gap between FPGAs, real-time programming, and high-level software.

I personally am very interested in the "software for hardware" realm, but it is a little difficult to find people doing interesting approaches. It's usually all Verilog or all VHDL on FPGAs with a smattering of HLS, all C/C++ embedded software, all high-level programming languages with soft real-time on single-board computers or something similar, or somewhere in between with something like LabVIEW. But there's usually almost no overlap between the people that do work in each of those categories.

There's a lot of constraints in these systems and almost all of the innovation has come at sort of the chip level in terms of hardware performance. The design and development process, tools, and experience have seen little innovation, as far as I can tell. Everything remains hard in embedded systems. I don't see any reason why it needs to be that way though.