You've probably overshot the TMI threshold but the basic idea is pretty clear. Of course the devil is in the details and those should be confidential.
The Kintex, especially of it's a faster speed grade, is a pretty good device for products that aren't in the 'price is no object' category.
I haven't had the interest, incentive or time to do anything with Vitis, mostly because it doesn't support any of the platforms that I have to work with directly. Vivado 2019.1 and the SDK support freeRTOS natively, but don't underestimate issues learning the Xilinx version of the Eclipse IDE. You will no doubt have to make adjustments to the default settings. It might take some time even for a seasoned SW engineer to get comfortable with. By comfortable, I mean familiar with it's idiosyncrasies and bugs. So don't underestimate the learning curve. You should be able to build a ZYNQ HW system using the board presets ( assuming that you are using the correct board version ) and create a freeRTOS BSP and applications without many issues. At least the second time should be pretty simple.
There are a lot of ways to do FPGA logic development so who knows if you can achieve your goals... on time. The Kintex family is more capable than Artix which you loaner board PL is akin to. I'd expect that you can run a MicroBlaze quite a bit faster than in the Zedboard PL. Don't ask how much because I wouldn't want to hazard a guess, which would be hazardous to anyone reading it.
If I were in your position, I'd concentrate on trying to get competent with the tools as a first step. This means having problems and being able to quickly find answers from the extensive Xilinx documentation, which is frequently out of date.
BTW, I really haven't a clue as to how a MicroBlaze in a X7020 PL debugging session would look like... I doubt that the tools are going to automatically download code to the PL buffers... better spend some time seeing if anyone has done that.
Yeah, ISE is no good as it does not work on Win 10. It last worked on Win 7, but that is outdated as well. You need to go with Vivado.
OPTION#1 Vivado 2021.1 can pull in the board catalog form XilinxBoardStore, which is has the Zedboard defined. Just click Refresh.
The XilinxBoardStore lists it under avnet.com as vendor:
OPTION#2: You can install our board files using the steps from https://digilent.com/reference/vivado/installing-vivado/2018.2?s[]=vivado&s[]=init&s[]=tcl#installing_digilent_board_files.
