> It gets a tremendous amount of unjustified hatred from people who don't realize what an impossible balancing act it is to build It's only an impossible bala

> It gets a tremendous amount of unjustified hatred from people who don't realize what an impossible balancing act it is to build It's only an impossible balancing act due to the absurd requirements imposed by civilians in Congress with little-to-zero understanding of the roles current-day aircraft fulfill and why we have role-specialized vehicles in the first place. And then they let the Marines dictate requirement after requirement in an attempt to replace the Harrier... no other service wanted VTOL, yet VTOL dominated the design considerations (causing all sorts of design trade-offs), leading to the turkey known as the F-35 project. A one-size-fits-all jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none aircraft was, is, and will remain a bad idea. Not to mention there's now 2 variants of the F-35 platform (the Navy version is larger and removed the VTOL capabilities), so it's not even meeting that original design goal anyway!