Lastly, I am not seeing anything on Amazons ToS that forbids mining, senseless says he does (or has done) it yet the o.p. and others have said Amazon will ban you for it. I'll make that bet and report back if I can ever get or build a working AFI (bitstream).
As long as you don't fire up a bunch of cpu miners on shared cpu resources, you're fine. Some nodes (including F1) have dedicated resources you can mine with. I did ask before i started cpu mining on the F1 nodes. No problem, it's dedicated. CPU mining on my fpga nodes gave an extra few K/mo.
I highly recommend Altera/Intel Quartus over Vivado for learning, despite using Xilinx for all my professional projects.
I second this, quartus was always more intuitive for me. Not a fan of vivado at all. Plus quartus has that placement engine that allows you to have your CPU sit there trying various placement combinations until you get the best. Best you get out a vivado without third party is a couple passes like the OP said.