the point is not to compete with asics... as we have seen recently any coin with a large marketcap is going to have an asic implemented after some time. the point is that an asic will only ever work for that algorithm. an fpga can do many many kinds of algorithms, you just need to program it. i assume the people who know fpga's can look at a coins algorithm and whip up a miner similar to how people cook up gpu miners for cpu only coins. your gravy would be any algo that you could implement efficiently onto an fpga that no one is going to make an asic for.