[Cadwhisker]

I've managed to make nice 'make' flows for Vivado, ISE, Quartus and DC. Libero took a bit more poking, but it's also possible.

The GUI interfaces are what newcomers tend to aim for straight away, but they're not good for any long-term "repeatable" build flows and they're no use for CI. I think this is where a lot of the frustration comes from.

[fooblaster]

I think my real problem is that xilinx pushes the gui flows heavily. It is extremely annoying to configure the mpsoc fabrics entirely outside of vivado. Same thing for using any of their bundled IP.

[Cadwhisker]

Yes, IP usage is awkward and tricky. You can use the GUI to make the initial .xci file or .tcl file, but when you build a project, you need to use the same version of Vivado that the IP core was originally created in. Xilinx have improved that a little with 'write_ip_tcl' and 'write_bd_tcl' now having flags that let you ignore the version (or minor version). I've not had time to try those yet.