You have to look at the other side of the coin as well. In order to have 1st protoype we would have frozen design in late 99/early 2000s. Did the Chimese have the capability to design the stuff you/are looking for? Secondly would they have given you the same even if they had it. The JFT was in competition aith the J10s and the Chinese de idion to duck out of buying the JFT is a rtestament to that.
We are looking at PAC of now but we were babies of the aviation field in 2000. What could have been incorporated? We wanted a simple design to learn aviation industry setup on. Would it have helped to have Gripen or the SU series to build as our first plane. We chose the most expexient way to enter the industry and our success has been beyond our own expectations.
You have seen what happened to the neighbours next door. Most of it was trying to design something which they were incapable of. It would have been a folly of mammoth proportions to go down that route of producing a high end 4th gen plane. Delay for PAF was not an option with 200 platforms needing replacement
Lastly why would the Chinese let you/have something that competes directly with what they were producing. Even they made compromises and then rectified the situation when they had developed the relevant tech.
As far as I have/been able to understand the whole debate emanated from the hinges on jft Bs which in fact is a minor issue. If it delayed things or cost you an additional 100000$ to find a solution would you have given the money which you did not have ? I think not!
A
I believe the Chinese understood how to do relaxed stability and composites in the early 1990s -- they were working on the J-10, for example.
So, we may not have gotten all of the bells and whistles we would like, but we weren't reaching China's cutting edge either.
Now if asking for more meant deciding between the Super-7 and the J-10, then I would've given the J-10 a serious look. However, I would've also pushed that we (1) get 49% workshare for all J-10 (all variants) production, (2) IP transfer and domestic capacity development, and (3) full access to the system for our customizations.
However, I don't think the situation was that stark. The Chinese evidently wanted a light exportable fighter. It was more of a matter of choosing something closer to the F-20 or inching more on the side of the Gripen. Either way, the design wouldn't have aligned with the PLAAF's ASR for a medium-weight fighter (i.e., J-10).
We ultimately fell somewhere in the middle, but I would rather we match the Gripen because we'll use this fighter for 30-40 years (and invest in the manufacturing overhead on top of it). If we run into issues due to the design of the JF-17 in the 2030s, we'll return to looking at getting yet another fighter (which is exactly the convo the PAF was having from 2015). So, what did we save, fiscally speaking?
That said, everything you're saying -- being novices, needing a low-cost plane to replace lots of older planes, etc -- runs back to the first thing I said on this issue, "I wish we had the budget."
If we had more money, we could do more, it's as simple as that and I never disagreed with it.
And yes, India had troubles with the Tejas, but at the same time, they got a much more mature and capable aerospace industry out of it. So the trade-off was quite real, and we can make a case for either one. After all, they have not one, or two, but three distinct fighter programs in the pipeline now, and their Tejas is in full production.
OTOH, we have JF-17, which we didn't design for ourselves (and is still a generation back in some areas), with a manufacturing overhead to amortize, and now a messy issue of finding an interim 4.5+ gen jet (likely J-10CE) and a not-well-defined NGFA initiative.
Can't help but think that we had the option to feasibly get a full-out Gripen-class fighter from day 1 (even with 90s' Chinese capabilities) that we could extend through the 2040s without any issues. In turn, we could avoid interim jets, and move straight into NGFA.
