As an outsider, I see this: there is a camp which uses open source only, and their phone as RCM, and there is the other gang of company-made jig users who doesn't care that it's stolen code, they just want their frii gaem to work.
I think the Mister is cool and all, but honestly I have seen some video's exploring the difference between hardware and software emulation and the advantages of both.... I would pick software over FPGA, wouldn't mind some sort of hybrid approach but I can only imagine how complex that would be and how expensive.
However it was dwarfed by the CFW wars which came shortly after.