I've done both. There are difficulties with both but overall I would say software is significantly more difficult than hardware.

Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex.

In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that software developers have that enable them to write extremely complicated programs.

I have hope for Veryl though.

Wow, super hard disagree, comment here sounds like the typical arrogance hardware engineers face from people in software who've never really done the job or have some superficial experiences.

I won't blindly state "software is easier" but software is definitely easier to modify, iterate and fix, which is why sofware tools and resulting applications can evolve so fast.

I have done both HW & SW, routinely do so, and switch between deep hardware jobs and deep software so I'm qualified to speak.

If you're blinking a light or doing something with Bluetooth you can buy microcontrollers that have this capability and yes that hardware is simple.

But have you ever DESIGNED a microcontroller, let alone a modern processor or complex system ?

Getting something "simple" like a microcontroller to reliably start-up involves complex power sequencing, making sure an oscillator works, a phase-locked-loop that behaves correctly and that's just "to make a clock signal run at a frequency" we're not talking about implementing PCIe Gen5 or RDMA over 100Gbps Ethernet.

Hardware engineers definitely welcome better tools but the cost of using an unproven tool or tool that might have "a few" corner cases resulting in your $5-million SoC not working is a hard risk to tolerate, so sadly(and to our pain) we end up using proven but arcane infrastructure.

Software in contrast can evolve faster because you can "fix it in software". New tools can be readily tested, iterated on and deployed.

What do you think about Atopile? I'm not a hardware person yet, but these seem similar.

https://atopile.io/