There are some excellent "subject matter experts" present and correct on this thread, and I would not dream of wading in with my miniscule subject knowledge in their area of expertise....however!
I know what I saw and I know what I heard and my memory is crystal. So you can take this to the bank.
I flew my entire RAF career in in an aircraft at the heart of not one, but two monumental procurement SNAFUs. The first one I was mere bystander...I'll not pointificate on it, but I'm fairly sure the resulting NAO report was blunt and led to a review of MOD procurement...other's will know more and can illuminate.
Humour inject...I recall at the time (in my native "knocker" wit) asking a VSO if Nimrod AEW stood for, "Nimrod, Airborne Elephant, White!)
On the second Nimrod SNAFU I was no bystander. And I am well aware that programme has it loyal supporters here (to this day). But nobody should ever be under any illusion that there were not plenty of serving aircrew of all categories, and heaps of engineers too, that called it out at the time (back then it was Nimrod 2000...lol). The airframe was glaringly deficient in any number of ways (internal capacity was way too small for starters) and there is absolutley **** all hindisght here...plenty of us predicted it would be a SNAFU from the get go and some of us...yep yours truly...had to do the soft shoe shuffle on the Staish's rug for expressing our views too forcibly.
When you make a dumb as **** decision on day one, the rest of it don't matter too much, the tax payers gonna pay.
I could give you more, but then I'd be ranting. What is written above is not a rant.
It's history.