You captured my sentiments well. I found OP's project extremely impressive and I never meant to detract from the hard work he put into it. When I was designing my own system, doing HDMI decoding on an FPGA was an option I considered. But HDCP (a from of DRM encryption on HDMI signals) was the deal breaker. Although there has been some recent research on MITM attacks to break HDCP, it's currently beyond my budget and patience.

It's much easier to sidestep HDCP altogether, which can be done with a simple AV converter.