Are FPGA's getting too complex?

I think it simply comes down to numbers. It costs a fortune to develop a new part, and all the technology will be in the new stratix. You'll see that cyclone and arria have almost identical parts to the stratix, just less of them and less flexible. But with that high NRE, they want to recoup as much as they can asap.

If they went into a new cheap part, they would have to sell in large volumes at the start to get the numbers to pay back some of that cost. But it's many months or years before a customer will start to ship in any decent volume, as they need to do their engineering. The top parts can be sold as engineering samples at a high premium, but a cyclone couldnt. So it only makes sense to sell the top end parts first.