jumping in late in the conversation. I have had Vmware work on a Mac with ubuntu 18.04. I might have run the Apio commands on the MacOS also as I was having issues getting the Mac to properly recognize the USB device.
Could you try the lsusb command on both the Mac and the VM?

We'll find a place, in the meantime I have emailed you a copy of the Docs your in need of.
Greg

Tips on programming and recovering a Quickfeather board 1. How do I program my QuickFeather board ? 2. Where do I get the manufacturing Binaries to program the QuickFeather with? 3. I bricked my board, how do I recover the bootloader images? 4. How do I download and test an FPGA and M4 Application w...

Thank-you for the information. This is being investigated

QuestaSim is the tested simulator, but any Verilog simulator should work.

SymbiFlow is currently only supported on Linux. CentOS7.x is the current best platform. Ubuntu will be available soon.

CentOS7 in a VM will be sufficient, be sure to allocate sufficient memory, but a single CPU will be fine. I recommend 8GBytes of RAM and of course more memory and/or CPUs won't hurt.