Tuning shouldn't be problem though, I was thinking you set some of the gain settings to really fairly conservative ones, then use whats called "process reaction curve method" to then properly figure out the values. Or try to get this piece of software and get it working.
http://bestune.50megs.com/
It looks interesting and apparently gives really good results plus the interface looks really simple as compare to a package like Matlab.
Personally we didn't cover that much FPGA's in class, we played around with some Xilinx dev boards nothing serious.