<mithro>
Lofty / umarcor: the Quartus -> VQM -> BLIF -> VPR flow was about allowing VPR to work on more "real world designs" given the lack of support for many constructs / languages / etc in ODIN-II / Yosys (specially back in 2014 when it was first released) -- See https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~kmurray/titan.html for a complete discussion. It is also what heavily drove VPR's support for SDC and other timing constraints and
<mithro>
There is work to have a similar set of Yosys -> BLIF -> VPR benchmarks for Xilinx 7 series and Ultrascale
<mithro>
Back in 2014, the capabilities of VPR place and route were significantly past the capabilities of the open source synthesis flow -- wasn't until 2015-03-22 that Project IceStorm was first released.