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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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And that's where the trouble starts with software engineers in general (including HDL only types): the majority has extreme difficulties thinking about problems in a parallel processing fashion. Old-school hardware engineers are very skilled in thinking in parallel processing. If someone trained in parallel processing (like an old-school hardware engineer) then turns to using HDL to implement the more complex designs, he'll be fine, because he's able to extrapolate from software into hardware and back; it should result in balanced and efficient HDL which can be turned into efficient hardware.
New(er) generation HDL/(or even old generation) software engineers are more likely to produce HDL which does not necessarily translate into efficient hardware. They basically depend on the quality of the compiler to get it right, which is not bad in itself, just a little unpredictable (at least with the current quality of compilers).
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