Yeah at university we had to do some hardware stuff in our software course. I know there were better debug tools available as some students purchased them but playing with microprocessors was no fun.

Verilog is not the best and that’s not even the worst part - tools like ISE/Vivado and Quartus are even worse!

It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)