Creating one thing with the purpose of doing everything well is usually a terrible idea. Why not have different planes for scouting, bombing, dogfighting? It just makes more sense to build for a particular use case, and send the right plane(s) for the job.

The whole thing seems like a bunch of guys with a bunch of other people's money got together and thought of all the cool things they wanted to see in a plane and set out to build it without really thinking about why, only to try to justify it after the fact.

In investing, you never double down on a stock that's sinking because "it might come back!" you get out of that stock and look for another one. I wish we'd just let this stupid plane die instead of sinking more tax dollars into a worthless project.