Software Development at 1 Hz
A 20s turnover is not even that slow. Debugging undecidable timing issues in an FPGA may have turnover counted in hours given how slow HW synthesizers are.<p>If the need of better tooling is clear, the OP does not mention one important point: faster machines have created some sort of fast food approach to programming, where programs are built on the go with the help of the appropriate tools (some sort of computer-aided programming).<p>Back in the 60s, when programs where being shipped by snail mail to some data center somewhere in the country to be entered by a random assistant and scheduled in a long pool of jobs, turnover was counted in days. Yet, we walked on the moon.<p>So beyond better tooling, maybe a key to maintaining that attention span is check is to simply spend more time on the design board.