BV -
I understand your reaction, but as we see there are incoherent and unqualified people on both sides of the debate, and people like myself who may have limited formal qualifications but have nonetheless tracked the relevant issues for many years.
Let us never forget the name of Sir John Clerk of Eldin, whose work on naval tactics influenced Nelson and others, despite the fact that, as far as we know, he never set foot on a ship. (By the way, his great-great-nephew was James Clerk Maxwell, whose work was fundamental to the design of the F-35.)
The important thing is to not get locked into one position or the other and to avoid being fixated on any given system or solution, to the point where (as we've seen with JSF) people seem to be saying "it's an awesome WVR jet" one week and "we have stealth and fusion, who needs WVR?", the next.
And while the original Cobra wasn't a missile-evasion maneuver, it was seen by many as a credible tactic to convert a disadvantageous position into an advantageous one - and even though the post-Cobra trajectory was predictable, it was important that the MiG-29 and Su-27 could do it with much less risk of departure than Western 4-gen types: a good example of how "air-show stunts" can represent real capabilities.