As this thread has diverted from the RAF and military aircraft to BEA/BOAC and civil aeroplanes, perhaps I can offer our younger contributors a sight of the dilemma we British manufacturers had in the 1960s. If we designed and built what our market research thought suitable, and BEA/BOAC disagreed, our international customers would complain that "it can't be any good as even BEA/BOAC won't buy it."
If we built to BEA's specification we could (and did) find ourselves with what one of our senior engineers has described as "an internationally unwanted aeroplane."
Happily when we and our partners were scheming what became Airbus (aeroplane and company) we were able to offer an aeroplane that we and the customers found worth buying.
Icare9's belief that we took too long to redesign the Comet should also be thought of with regard to the magnitude of the task. The Comet 1 accidents were in early 1954 and the Comet 4, essentially a totally different aeroplane, was designed and built in such numbers that BOAC could offer a transatlantic service from September 1958.