> they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning.

Well, the MiSTer project was yet 4 years from being launched back in 2013 when the RISC-5 was implemented in FPGA, so I hope you'd excuse Wirth from not choosing it.

Indeed, I excuse

And shortly after Wirth launched his RISC-5 system, the original FPGA board went out of production.

Which most likely wasn't predictable for him.

FPGAs were never that maker friendly, due to the whole ecosystem.

It probably was NRND on mouser/digikey by then... not that there was much choice in 2013- you went with what you had instead of $1000+ dev boards.