You will be much better served long-term by becoming friends with BGAs and QFNs. They are quite easy to solder - you just need a little practice.
As for ULPI - as you perhaps know it runs at 80 (correction - 60, thanks ataradov!) MHz, so it's about at a point where signal integrity and length matching becomes important, so making modules becomes more complicated, and usually these modules are designed for a specific main board.
Another reason these devices are not popular is complexity of implementing USB protocol, both on HW and SW side. You can somewhat alleviate SW complexity by reusing USB stack in Linux, but that will require implementing HW controller compliant with EHCI specification, which is not an easy feat (though certainly not impossible). That specification requires implementing DMA master as controller is supposed to perform intensive memory operations - it's supposed to walk through various memory descriptor tables in memory and execute commands as per their contents. Also ECHI only covers USB 2.0 (including split transactions used to talk to USB 1.x devices connected to a USB 2.0 hub), so if you want to connect USB 1.x devices directly to your root USB port, you will also need to implement UHCI "companion" controller to cover these.
The only FPGA board I know which has ULPI PHY onboard is Digilent's Genesys 2, but it's price of US$1000 is probably beyond typical hobbyist's budget. So the best bet would probably be to roll your own, hence my first recommendation to get familiar with soldering QFNs and BGAs.