As an ex hardware engineer turned software engineer I think what you're aiming for here is great!. I have always thought that a lot of the day to day software development tools would be a huge productivity boost if they were somehow reimagined / re-implimented for hardware design (and probably a ton of other industries, we take the level of tooling for granted).

My old colleagues have started to bring things like bug trackers and SCM to their workflow, but its still ~15year old tech (using SVN for VHDL for example)

I didn't see any mention of versioning, merging changes that kinda of thing. Do you have any plans there?