I was going to try VHDL, until I found out PSoC only takes Verilog. I can see me making the most practical use of HDL through PSoC, so I'm not quite sure where to go now.
You're talking about the Cypress PSoC devices? The FPGA fabric is pretty small. It works for its intended purpose, of course, but I'm not sure you can implement a full RISC CPU, for example. The fabric is really intended to be glue logic with access to the datapath.
I have been playing with those PSoC devices and I like them a lot. I kind of enjoy the graphical programming approach. I'm hoping we get a lot further along with the PSoC 6 robotics project. I'm waiting...
If I were starting from scratch with FPGAs, I would probably start with Arty 7 - an Artix 7 development board. The problem with the board is that it doesn't have gadgets like 7 segment displays and a bunch of switches and buttons. My personal favorite, at the moment, is the Nexys 4 DDR board but it is pricey. The chip is huge, it has all of the gadgets I want and it is really easy to work with. Maybe that's why it is targeted at universities.
If I did start with Arty, I would build a PCB with LEDs, 7 segment displays, slide/toggle switches and buttons. These would all be connected to one or more IO expanders and interfaced with the FPGA via SPI. In fact, I did something quite similar with I built my CPU project several years ago. There is a board with 16 toggle switches and another board with 16 digits of 7 segment displays (Maxim makes the controller). It is really easy to implement SPI on the FPGA.
I started with VHDL and I have no intention of changing. In many ways, VHDL is like Pascal - strongly typed and simply elegant. Wordy, but elegant. I find Verilog incomprehensible. One look at the code and my eyeballs roll back. It looks like C without the style. Things like blocking assignments, non-blocking assignments, always * blocks, wires and regs just haven't clicked. They never will because I'm not planning to spend the time required to make them click.
Nobody else likes Verilog either; it was always the ugly stepchild of HDLs. So what did they do? They took the good features of VHDL and tacked them onto Verilog to create SystemVerilog. But the good stuff in SystemVerilog started with the good stuff in VHDL.
SystemVerilog may eventually take over from VHDL. Verilog itself was always a smaller player. It may actually be worth learning SystemVerilog.
In any event, all 3 languages are gigantic (particularly VHDL) and only a small percentage of the language is actually used to create logic. There are huge portions of all of these languages that just doesn't get used - especially by hobbyists.
Everybody, including me, will try to justify the language they are using. Java has portability, C has pointers (oh, wait, that's not a plus), C has conciseness and easily approaches the hardware, FORTRAN is still a standard language in the scientific community (and I would bet it is still used in aerospace), C++ has objects, PASCAL is elegant (I'm still thinking about Modul2 and Oberon) and, for the life of me, I can't get excited about Python, Perl, Ruby or Rust.
I'll just stick with what I know until something comes along that pushes me in a different direction.