As much as I love PSoC, and how capable it is, it's a pretty unique environment, sure you can use Verilog or VHDL but most of the times you just use the components they offer and it will take you a while until you need a custom component that would require HDL.
Other limitations are that it only has one single PLL although you can create other frequencies by using frequency dividers.
As for FPGAs/CPLDs it's really not too difficult either, and it doesn't require you to learn VHDL or Verilog, or at least not much if you can work on schematic form, here is a simple tutorial on someone's question on how to make his logic gates work properly because his inputs where pulled high so pressing them was actually a 0 input when he expected a 1 (VCC)
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/bemicro-cv-questions/msg524041/#msg524041But a PSoC is still pretty capable as well to deal with a lot of tasks:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/make-use-of-an-old-cga-monitor/45/of course one of my favourite links for PSoC (this relates to the PSoC 4 Pioneer kit) but their new PSoC 5LP prototype board can do so much more.
http://www.element14.com/community/thread/23736/l/100-projects-in-100-days?displayFullThread=trueLink to the PSoC 5LP prototype board
http://www.cypress.com/?rid=108038But the problem is that even if all the examples can be ported, you just can't just do that from the get go, so going that route might require you to get a pioneer kit (no DMA and less resources) to get your feet wet.
Same goes with the BeMicro CV or the BeMicro MAX10, they are inexpensive but not too many examples:
http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/BeMicro_Max_10But Altera has a lot of free training videos but it will require a lot of ramp-up.
On the Xilinx front you could use the Papilio Pro or the newer Papilio Duo
http://papilio.cc/But of course the older Pro has more examples than the Duo.
http://papilio.cc/index.php?n=Papilio.LearningIncluding forum member hamster_nz "Intro to Spartan FPGA eBook"
http://forum.gadgetfactory.net/index.php?/page/articles.html/_/papilio/logicstart-megawing/intro-to-spartan-fpga-ebook-r34(Btw, I shouldn't ask, but if you read this, is the new one going to happen or work took over that?)
So at the end it's pretty much what has more examples and available training to facilitate the ramp up.
Also it has to do on what you want to do, I bet the other suggestions are as good, you just have to jump into one and allow yourself time to get up to speed. But having sample code always helps to learn, although sometimes it doesn't because you just use the stuff without looking on why it works.
Last, Altera/Terasic has a new DE0-Nano_SoC, that has a dual core ARM Cortex A9. I have one but have not had time to dig into it. But it's way harder to use than the PSoC.
One thing that can be frustrating with Altera is getting a good understanding of their Avalon interconnect since most of their IP (intellectual property) components rely on that master slave, and their samples used the NIOS soft core and it acted as a black box. Maybe the new one with the ARM processor is easier to start with but it will require at least 4 months totally dedicated to it. That is needed if you want to access external components that need some initialization and even if the component would do it for you, it's tied to their proprietary IPs with no source to know how to use it in a different way.
Again, you have to define what you want to do, I think the PSoC is faster to learn and get going, but that doesn't prepare you much to graduate to CPLDs and FPGAs.
The Papilio is a cool concept and it does makes things a bit easy without the intricacies of Xilinx's ISE since it hides a lot from you.
Never used Lattice but I've seen what Mike can do with it so I bet it's a great starting point as well.
Another point will be that you might make a mistake wiring things and break the dev board (knock on wood since all of mine are still functional)
It's cool that there are so many choices but I can see why it can be frustrating, I have about 17 HDL capable dev boards, most of the PSoC but one Xilinx (papilio duo) and 8 Altera ones including one MAX 10 that it's borderline FPGA/CPLD.
Of all of them the PSoC takes the less space on installation. So the toolchain is another consideration.
My favorite go to, is still the original DE0-Nano (have two of them) but it's a bit spartan but has a lot of GPIOs, but the BeMicro MAX 10 is just $30 and the PSoC 5LP prototyping board is $10, $25 for the Pioneer and $4 for the PSoC 4 prototyping kit.
I wouldn't use the PSoC for anything higher than 40MHz or anything that needs a lot of different clocks that can't be derived from a single PLL.