The whining wasn't completely nonsense: the JSF / F-35 program is a prime example of procurement malpractice where the government set flawed initial requirements which made the final product later, more expensive, and less capable than it should have been. Congress and the Department of Defense repeated the same errors from the debacle of the TFX / F-111 program and then compounded the problem with additional unforced errors like trying to do concurrent testing and production.

But in the end the F-35 really does work pretty well by all credible accounts. It could have been a lot worse.