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For my needs, the only Altera dev kit barely flexible & complete enough is the Terasic DE2, but even that falls short. Notably the 8 MiB SDRAM is far far too little and the 2C35 is on the small side.
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If it's "far too short", then you're probably trying something that's well outside the board's original target audience -- university (educational) users. 8MB is plenty for teaching and deomnstrating most digital-lab and computer architecture topics. And SDRAM ss good enough for some engeinering specific stuff (like low-speed image-processing, realtime sound processing, etc.)
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I hope the A-team aren't too proud to take a look at main competitors offerings. Boards like the ML501 and ML401 offer some really nice features for a fair price, while the S3A starter kit is very good value.
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?!? The Xilinx ML series are industrial boards -- minimal example designs and design-support for them. (though I must admit, Xilinx has greatly improved on this area in the past few years.)
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The NIOS dev kits (I have one of those too) are ridiculously expensive for the feature they offer - only 16 MiB!, where is the VGA out, the dual PS/2 in, audio?, etc.
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No general-purpose board, which sells in high enough volume to be "cheap" is going to please everyone. And no niche-board with exactly the right features for YOU (and no one else) is going to be cheap enough to please the 1-2 customers interested in it. Product engineering is a compromise, like everything else. Just like you had to accept compromises when you decided to buy the Altera boards, knowing it would satisfy only some of your requirements.
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