And that is it in a nutshell.
My expertise is 40 years out of date, but back then I was a CAS guy. A very expendable part, as I realized even then. It is indeed a down and dirty, eyeball-to-eyeball, all bets off environment where accuracy and timeliness are everything. There is no perfect aircraft for that job, only adequate ones.
In the end, we will have spent trillions of dollars and decades of time on an aircraft that may end up having little or no useful lifetime simply because we took far too long to get it there. The jocks who fly it may come to appreciate it, they may learn to use it in ways that the engineers never foresaw, and it may turn out to be more or less adequate. But it won't ever be anything better than that.
