@oe1cxw before I try to prod a friend into working on FPGA reverse engineering, how capable would an individual being very good at reverse engineering software and its undocumented binary formats, but hasn't worked directly with much physical hardware be?
I think at least some experience with using FPGAs would be a requirement before starting to re FPGA bit-streams. So that would be the starting point imo: actually use FPGA for some nontrivial tasks first.