2sr2worry
Naval Aviation=world's greatest team sport
Maybe so, but it's still essentially a bigger (super) hornet.
To boil the story down simply, the Super Hornet was sold as a mega-ECP to the legacy Hornet--to avoid the "new start" label which would have killed the timeline we needed to fill the gap caused by A-6 retirement and A-12 kill. The logic behind selling the ECP label was that a great amount of "commonality" would exist between Supers and legacies. And we had great success in that arena because as anyone in the logistics arena knows, the Super Hornet is 60% "common" with the legacy Hornet--by weight.
Re YF-17 and the F-18..Congress directed the Navy to embrace the LWF loser and Northrop was directed to find a carrier-aware partner...that's how McAir got involved. Anyone that's curious for all the details needs to read "Pentagon Paradox." For anyone that's followed the design from YF-17 to the present, the early lot Hornets still had the "slotted LEX" that was present in the YF-17 Cobra. And when we filled up the LEX we ended up with the vertical tail flutter--and then we stiffened the tail and shoved the piece of angle iron onto the fuselage that morphed into the LEX fence...and we also had CG and landing gear issues so we needed to move the main mounts aft but still fit the gear in the same spot so we ended up with the wonderful planing link...and then we had to fix the roll issues because the darned aircraft wouldn't roll...and then we had to fix the titanium fires in the engine...and so on..and so on...but we still ended up with a platform that will end up being produced for almost 40 years and serving the Navy well. Not a bad deal.