Another friend is one of the many experimental test pilots assigned to Army Redstone. He told me years back of a tabletop exercise that I found interesting. Essentially a room of test guys was given a “100%” budget for a future vertical lift/ assault/ scout aircraft to dole out in 10% increments for speed, payload, range, weapons capability, and a couple more factors. Essentially he said that (at best) speed was allotted 30%; his point was that it doesn’t matter how fast a helo/ tiltrotor can go if it outruns its escorts, runs out of fuel, or needs MX that cannot be performed at the battlefield level. V280, Raider, and the rest have a lot of neat capabilities, but at the end of the day they struggle with the less-sexy bits - as with it all, time will tell which direction big Army decides to go in.