Reading the post in entirety would have helped instead of cherry picking. I stated 3 objectives
Which I have and in my first point I explained why I don't agree with your 3rd objective, so I didn't picked out things.
I hope you understand that, and who evaluated life cycle costs of project and not just the aircraft is in contention here.
For you maybe and we both know where that is coming from and lets skip the parts that are based on your favourism of HAL, since we won't change anything by discussion the pros and cons now. For the MMRCA and the general life cycle discussion now, there is no point of who evaluated it, but on what data they are based and how reliable the data is. It doesn't matter if it's IAF or HAL, what's really important is, how comparable are the data that the vendors gave us, based on their experience or estimates, to the actual cost in IAF operations.
Assuming your argument is absolutely correct
Then EFT, and Rafale had Captor E and RBE2 Operational? RFI was issued by IAF, RAC was not trying thrust an aircraft down the throat of IAF, if mig 29 ovt, had nothing to offer then why did IAF send RFI and RFP to RAC to begin with, and waste the tax payers money. If Mig29 had nothing to offer then why include it in MMRCA.
Rafale has the AESA operational, the EF as I said not and sending out the RFI to all possible vendors is a common procedure from our side and made sense by the MRCA, since we already operated the Mig 29, which made it back than, to the best fast to induct option after the Mirage 2000-5. When the competition was changed to M-MRCA, the RFP logically was sent to the same vendors that already were in the former competition + to the EF consortium and Boeing.
Btw, you make it sound like it's Indias fault that the Russians could not offer more advantages, but it's not, in fact the Russians could had done it smarter, by offering us more industrial benefits to counter the lack of operational capabilities. For example, if they had offered to divert the Mig 29K / 35 production completely to India and to integrate the fixed Kaveri engine, they might had won the competition. But they didn't, they wanted to get the best for their industry, which however is the biggest problem for IAF, to remain dependent on the Russians in such a big way. So by reducing the dependance, they could had made their offer far more attractive to us, even if the fighter was not the best choice.
RVV-PD all aspect would have given a significant BVR advantage
Not like Meteor, but both of these are not part of the ToT and since we aim on replacing R77 versions with Astra, it's doubtful that we had procured them even if we had bought the Mig 35.
Increase in fuel was later shown in Mig29UPG, so was completely achievable.
The UPG is based on the older airframe and not on the one of the Mig 29 SMT, K or 35. The Mig 35 was proposed to us with bigger wings, compared to the SMT and the K, to carry more fuel and payload, but that never was developed, only shown on models and brochures. So the question is not if it's achivable or not, but what of the promised capabilities were actually there to evaluate? AESA only in pre-mature state with a lot of issues back then, no bigger wings, TVC only in the OVT, no new weapons or sensors that could be tested, since the aim is, that upgrades of weapons and techs, developed for Pak Fa could be diverted and integrated to the Mig too (upgraded weapons, the new Russian LDP, electro optics...).
Question, how do you evaluate life cycle cost of a non-existent aircraft to begin with and how credible would that cost be?
The same way all fighters will be evaluated, by the estimates you get from the vendors.
Rafale came to india with a prototype radar and not an operational one
Not a prototype, but a serial production one.
Then where is the penalty clause?
In the final contracts, that fixes the delivery, the way the fighters must be delivered and the timeframes..., but not in the first request of proposal.
And do we know the unit cost of the same MFD's that the JV would be providing compared to what HAL could have given?
Why do we have to know? The importance is on, producing them in India, not producing them by HAL, therefore the RFP requires offsets back to Indian industry, not necessarily to HAL, even if you would have prefered that.
HAL is the biggest player at the moment, but that's mainly because there is no option and not because they are the best choice. So giving them all, only because they are big is also not the best choice for India and wrt MFD's, I don't think you would disagree that Samtel did a pretty good job in gaining know how wrt avionics and becoming a major player in this field too or?
how would IAF even be able to tell with 100% confidence that the bid supported can let BEL completely manufacture the RBE2 from scratch within a given time period?
Again, why do you think IAF would do that? They evaluated the "offers" which said that X and Y techs will be offered as part of the RFP requirements, they don't evaluate or even contract things between BEL and Thales, that would relate to the manufacturing part, that happens only after the final selection of the fighter as we have seen for the last 2-3 years.
