Hopefully the US Army realizes they are better off making this race a marathon versus a sprint, and add a year or two to the development schedule.
Especially since this competition is supposed to be for a near production aircraft
OTOH, taking as long as we do drives up costs makes planning uncertain and puts programs in serious risk of cancellation. Aside from other fiefdoms vying for another program's money for their own, there's political reality. FARA is intended to around 2028. That's 10 years after FARA was initiated and 19 years after FVL began. That's three Presidential and five Congressional elections away from today. A lot of the champions of the program now won't be around when it's time to pay the bills, and taking too long opens the door for too much political theater. ("I pledge to stop this wasteful killing machine that's ripping food from the mouths of disadvantaged [insert subject of pandering here]"!).
It didn't use to be this way. Take the F-14: RFP: 1968; Contract Award: 1969; First Flight: 1970;. IOC: 1973; First Deployment: 1974. The F-15 didn't take that much longer. Where have we gone wrong since then?