What do you want from kit? Availability, Reliability, Maintainability, at a fair and reasonable cost
As a pilot I want something that works well; I'm not particularly interested in how it gets there. I don't know where your love affair for the Blue Fox comes from but you certainly weren't an end-user or else you'd be a lot more cynical.
It was very good for surface search (given its pedigree is should have been) but it wasn't particularly good in the air to air environment. Sure, it had excellent integration with the weapons aiming computer and, after a lot of practice, could produce a semi-useful track-while-scan model but it was susceptible to weather and chaff and had really quite poor performance as far as pick-ups were concerned. Medium level you'd get a Harrier coming towards you at around 18nm but look at the SIZE of those intakes. Hawk etc, you'd be lucky to get outside of 8nm. Low level, just turn it off because all it would do is warn someone you were coming. There were some clever gizmos in it and enough to get the boffins excited but these didn't really add anything to pilots trying to defeat superior platforms in the air-to-air environment.
It was better than nothing but I have no idea where these reports of it being the dogs bollox come from. Now, Blue Vixen was a completely different kettle of fish
