In any case
'I have a board with the chip on' is IMHO a ridiculous
reason
for picking a particular clase of device.
Development hardware tends to be very expensive, and familiarity
is important. Taking an ultra-purist attitude, I'd agree with your
assertion, but practical matters do come into play sometimes.
And yet only the other day people were telling me how cheap it was to get
the development setup for CPLDs, FPGAs, microcontrollers, etc. You can't
have it both ways :-)
More seriously, the setup for microcontrollers should be pretty simple.
Most of the modern ones seem to have an in-system-programming interface,
normally similar to SPI. That can be bit-banged over the lines of a
parallel port. The software is free if you have somethign to run it on
(and I suspect any machien capable of running FPGA development software
can run microocntroller development software too), or in the case of
microcontrollers yoy can write your own.
As regards the actual hardware. as I said, you can hand-wire the
microcontroller, clock crystal, HPIB buffers, etc on a bit of square-pad
board in an hour or so.
-tony