What has to be understood is that this thread demonstrates the bleeding edge of FPGA mining. Sure, 95% percent who are interested will not even try the hardware mod.
But what will happen when FPGA cards come out of the box, will mods needed for mining? And at a price point of $2500-$3000? GPU mining will be effectively dead for non-ETH scenarios.
The unknown aspect is how FPGA are able to adapt to potential resistance from coins/Devs who will fork. The Phi/Lux will be probably be the first case.
I am mining Lux and hope they succeed

Will be exciting for sure! As i just got the new 1080 ti cards selling them at a loss and buying FPGA is not very tempting.
But watching the thread to be updated.