I agree!
There is no good "getting started" manual to implement a hardware design on the board.
The little demos on the sd are mostly targeted to buy software from 3. party vendors, and of no use for the development as such. Furthermore most of those offerings are a joke, I'm not willing to pay >3000€ for a SD Card Core???
The design example for the NiosII Standard system neither is no good, very difficult to change/adapt to ones purposes, documentation is very thin, no explanation of the how's and why's.
I would not buy this board again.
regards, Fried