Why not just choose a small set of "golden" chips, create high quality drivers that abstract away incompatibilities if possible, and verify the heck out of that ?
That's… sort of happening with laptops. Pretty much any modern laptop with an Intel CPU uses a small set of Intel chips for everything. My dmesg includes:
em0: <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection>
iwm0: <Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 7260>
xhci0: <Intel Panther Point USB 3.0 controller>
ehci0: <Intel Lynx Point LP USB 2.0 controller USB>
ahci0: <Intel Lynx Point-LP AHCI SATA controller>
drmn0: <Intel Haswell (ULT GT2 mobile)>
Most laptops from the same generation use the exact same set of chips.
The trouble with "golden" chips is a) the manufacturer can EOL it at any time (and I don't think just the OSS people are numerous enough to keep any specific set in production), and b) it freezes things in time. For things that don't change much (e.g. sound cards), no problem, but there's still improvements to be made in other areas.
The focus for FPGAs has traditionally been performance, but I think there's a model where they can be used for both long-lived compatibility and cutting-edge devices living together on the same chip.
