Could try something like Icarus Verilog for an open source compiler and start building some toy designs. There are some good communities and blogs to find help.
Have to agree this is a major pain point for wider adoption. The current tools are mainly developed by a few big EDA vendors. I'm hoping, through the growth of open hardware communities, we'll start to see more friendly tools making progress.
There is diaspora*, which aims to be a decentralized replacement. Though replacing the social inertia is much harder than creating the tech. https://diasporafoundation.org/