iCE40 is one of the niche-market (in this case, ultra-low-power) FPGAs that your post's parent talks about. iCE40 competes primarily with other boutique manufacturers and ancient big-vendor parts like CoolRunner CPLDs, not full-featured top tier FPGAs like Virtex. No Holy Grail of open tooling is going to make up for a lack of essential features which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
Especially since the FPGA vendors keep wisely funding and buying most of the best results in academia to keep them from being open. I was excitedly looking at one with many fold speedup in synthesis earlier until I saw the word Altera in the credits. (sighs) There goes another one...
