The abortive Euro Heavy Lift enabled the French and German governments to pump millions of Euros into Airbus to get the answer everyone knew from the start; the rest of Europe was already flying -47s, the -53K wasn’t far away, and a 3rd NATO heavy lift aircraft would therefore struggle to find a market outside the two originating nations and, ergo, be horrendously expensive to buy and operate (likely even more so than the -53K). Nice way of funnelling some money to Airbus though........