Survey: FPGA PCB layout

Does anybody out there have a good methodology for determining your
optimal FPGA pinouts, for making PCB layouts nice, pretty, and clean?
The brute force method is fairly maddening. I'd be curious to hear if
anybody has any 'tricks of the trade' here.

Also, just out of curiosity, how many of you do your own PCB layout,
versus farming it out? It would certainly save us a lot of money to
buy the tools and do it ourselves, but it seems like laying out a
board out well requires quite a bit of experience, especially a 6-8
layer board with high pin count FPGA's.

We're just setting up a hardware shop here, and although I've been
doing FPGA and board schematics design for a while, it's always been
at a larger company with resources to farm the layout out, and we
never did anything high-speed to really worry about the board layout
too much. Thanks in advance for your opinions.

Dave