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This is still an important, possibly overriding factor. I remember quite well the visionaries promoting the repurposing of C++ commodity programmers into hardware "designers". The takeover just happened to be with VHDL etc.
HDLs make designs less dependent on "gurus" who actually understand hardware, unlike many young pups just out of school, reared on VHDL or Verilog, who couldn't design a 7-segment decoder by hand to save their life, or understand how a JKFF state machine works (actually, I thought JKFFs sucked: once you have DFFs there's no going back IMO).
The gurus only design compilers now. Rooms full of cheap "paper clip" pseudo-HW engineers crank out the HDL, having only a hazy idea of how their stuff will be expressed in the actual hardware.
//A
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I think thats rather unfair. Technology today is much different. People have to deal with generating large multi-dimensional filters with complex memory controllers and other complex interfaces (as an example). Id hate to see anyone try to create large FPGA designs using 74 series chips. The best engineers I know still understand all the old school stuff, but are much happier today in the HDL world. They all know what kind of resource usage they will be looking at without even writing a word of HDL code.
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