How much more time and money are they going to need to wrap up the F-35 jet now?

No sharks.

0/10

I think the baseline Block 3F is still on schedule. But these days and age a development of a fighter continues throughout its entire service life. Even old F-15s are still being upgraded with AESA radars and new ECM gear.

The F-35 program had a long rough period of mismanagement for sure but generally things are stable now. Of course there are other questions like former SecDef Gate's "wisdom" in ending F-22 production so early but it should be a good fighter for what it was designed to do, a replacement for the F-16, F/A-18, and AV-8.

Looking back I think there were two major mistakes made.

Throwing the Navy into the program as something to give them instead of A/F-X, it really wasn't what the Navy needed and the configuration of the final Lockheed ASTOVL/CALF designs before JAST would have had better performance than the F-35 in some regards. Now I am normally not a fan of canard-delta layouts but in that case it compensated well for the length limitations imposed on the fighter imposed by the elevators of a LHA/LHD.

The McDonnell Douglas design should have been selected for further development rather than the Boeing design which resulted in the X-32. For some reason there was a real aversion to using lift jets. I know the shaft-driven lift fan was Lockheed's pet project and they'd have thrown a fit but I wonder if the MDD design could have worked with it.