The problem with FPGAs is the design software. Have you ever tried to use WebPACK ISE or Quartus? Both of them blow. Terrible UI, terrible design, terrible licensing requirements.
We need simple, easy, powerful, and free tools for FPGA development before open source FPGA cores take off.
But I am suggesting an alternative to your second point. When FPGA boards become available to more people, the tools will automatically come. Note that, the open-source tools can be built by software professionals, even though they might be amateurs in hardware design.
Thee's already cheap ($50 and less) FPGA boards. But all FPGAs are proprietary, there's no available documentation on the internals, the bitstream, and many other things one need to create 3.party/open source tools.
And I also suspect they're hard to impossible to reverse engineer.
We need simple, easy, powerful, and free tools for FPGA development before open source FPGA cores take off.