Yes, the barrier to entry is far greater than any other popular form of mining and, currently, there is no community.  That said a couple of members here are starting to have slightly open discussions that it seems even they are realizing benefits themselves in participating.

Like fpga's the work on fpga mining is incredibly parallelized with each person interested having to solve the very same problems everyone else is solving or has already solved.  Understandably greed is a stronger motive than the altruism that started the open source projects that this technology stands on the shoulders of.

Ironically, for fpga's that parallelization is what makes them so efficient.  The same cannot be said of the lack of community within fpga software development.