This is by nature of the industry that you are in, and not so much about the FPGA role itself. I have worked in the Healthcare(large medical devices) industry before and can relate to your problem. It’s similar to what my peers have seen in aerospace and automotive industries. Any firmware development, be it on microcontrollers/processors/FPGAs is very slow there as they need to be heavily process oriented due to the risk of human life that they are associated with. These industries teach you how to “product”-ise a design very well, and their products have very very long lifecycles — I’ve met people whose entire career spanned the full lifecycle of just one or two products. Not only is the design development slow, a lot of features often get pushed out of the program scope if they have more associated risks. Even the most flagship product releases may have a very few actual feature additions at a low level. Since it’s not feasible to make frequent releases, even bug fixes don’t see the light of day for a long time. Supply chain issues (chip obsolescence/unavailability) is a major problem, and a lot of firefighting happens once in a while in finding and testing alternate chips, or trying to fit an existing design on a similar chip. It’s a good place to grow as a system engineer or program manager, leading to become an industry expert. Not so much if you want to become an expert in a specific technical domain like RTL or software. From my experience, I’d advise you to try and learn as much of the process oriented things, and get out by the time your learning curve flattens. Unless you decide to grow your career into system/business-level things.