CFfag here. Not airfag btw.
F35 is a decent multirole fighter, Which is exactly what we need.
In a perfect world we would get some dedicated Air superiority fighters and dedicated ground attack aircraft, but we simply don't have the budget for that. Furthermore, we don't really have the need for it. Most of our missions will be airstrikes against poorly equipped enemies in close proximity to our troops. Anything more will have our allies involvement, with us in a support role. If (more like when) the Russian shit heats up again, yeah, we'll have to invest in some interceptors. But frankly mainland invasion of North America by anyone = nukes gonna fly and time to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of the fucking entire world.
Furthermore, our current jets are getting old as fuck. Over the next 5 years we will spend more money (a great deal of that in man hours) keeping them flying than if we bought the F35 and were flying them like a boss. I guess we could have bought some used jets from the Amerifags or something, but we had so many problems with those used subs we got that I bet people would be bitching even more about that. One plus about the F35 is that since the Americans are investing so heavily into it, they will be developing retrofits for them for the next 30+ years, so we wont have to invest as much into trying to cram the latest electronics or sensors into a small enough package to fit into the F35 in a decade because someone else will already have done it. Conversely, if we did develop such a thing, we could sell it to our allies who use the F35.
Anyways, this fucking debate is a decade too late. The money is spent, the deals were made. If you didn't want the F35 then you should have said so in the 90s when we made this decision. (I don't care if you were 10 fuckface, I'm talking about the 96% of people bitching about this deal who weren't too young. stop being a fucking idiot.)