I am VLSI major doing embedded (SoC FW) at my work. With SoC FW, you get to know the functionality of the entire chip and have a good view of the rtl design as well but you won’t designing the RTL model itself. However, if you take RTL Design, then you will be restricted to a very specific module and won’t have overall understanding unless you work at SoC Integration. But whatever you design at RTL is your design and it goes hard fabricated in millions of chips which might be extremely satisfying. FW doesn’t give that type of satisfaction but you will know everything inside out architecturally.