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.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).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.So beyond better tooling, maybe a key to maintaining that attention span is check is to simply spend more time on the design board.