It might be reasonable at this point to remind everyone of Rafale, which aside from the F-111 (I believe) is the only high-performance aircraft to have been designed from the egg for CTOL and CV. They did a nice job (inventing CATIA in the process) and Rafale M has a much lower OEW than F-35B or F-35C, and can definitely beat the former in everything except LO, and (I suspect) can haul as much as far as the latter also.
This brings up an interesting viewpoint on carrier STOVL. When you operate a jet fighter from an 800-1000 foot deck, you need some assistance in acceleration and deceleration. On a conventional carrier, this is provided by catapults and arrester gear that (speaking hypothetically as an aviator) I leave behind on the boat. When I go STOVL, I take those functions off my >50,000 ton ship and put them on my airplane, where I carry them around all the time, even when I'm pulling 7 g. Note the OEW delta between the F-35A and F-35B, even though the latter has no internal gun and an aggressively lightened structure.
Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, one could say "but wait, STOVL lets me operate from mini-carriers". But when you define your carrier-air mission such that you want to do defensive CAP and air-to-ground missions concurrently, and your airplane is F-4-sized, this no longer applies.
Last edited by LowObservable; 1st Nov 2019 at 13:43.