I am certainly not clueless and worked with a few tools. From a GUI perspective, recent Vivado releases may appear as an improvement to earlier concoctions, but from the operation behind the curtains, it's still the same mess (indeed) and eventually made me migrate to a Lattice ECP5. There's still one world between Vivado and Synplify..
I'm typically putting every aspect of the work flow into one Makefile these days to be sure things are in sync (something which Xilinx seems to never get working properly).
Anyhow, there are lots of ways to make your life easier with Opensource tools. If you don't like it, change it.
I for myself just prefer an environment, that, once set up, builds and tests with one command, instead having to remember a sequence of clicks here and there. Same goes for all Eclipse based patch work. It can be really cool and it can be a mess, especially when maintenance is needed and things don't build or are out of sync and you have to find out where.