Can poor hobbyists utilise FPGAs?
You don't need to be filthy rich to use programmable logic

In the "glue" world -- CPLDs are what you are after if you just need a small patch of programmable logic.  In general, older CPLDs these days are 3.3V devices, with newer devices having 1.8V cores and 1.8 or 3.3V I/O, and can be in-circuit programmed and boundary scanned through JTAG, with the "program memory" internal to the device. (5V CPLDs existed, but are universally obsolete.)

The one downside is that they generally are only supported by a vendor-specific toolchain (such as Quartus for Altera, or ISE for Xilinx.)  Fortunately, free-as-in-beer, albeit limited-size, versions are available, and they're large enough for CPLDs as well as the smaller/less expensive FPGAs that are available on not-terribly-expensive devboards these days.

Also, for FPGAs -- most of your debugging will be done at the simulation level with the aid of a testbench, as opposed to in the silicon directly.  Furthermore, most FPGAs have support for internal node scan through JTAG, although the free-as-in-beer toolchains may or may not support it.  Finally, some FPGA technologies require the "program" to be loaded into them at startup (Xilinx, Altera, and Atmel parts are all this way; Lattice and Actel/Microsemi parts, on the other hand, are CPLD-like in that the "program" is stored on-chip persistently.)