I think you're right in that there needs to be an easy way in. I have some FPGA hardware, I was an FPGA hardware engineer in the dim and distant past, and tried to follow a tutorial, but still didn't get very far trying to make a RISC-V machine. I did however manage to install a simple RISC-V virtual machine (on x86-64) [1]. But yes, it needs to be much easier.

[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/booting-risc-v-linux-w...