Don't hold your breath. The contracts announced are just the formalisation of the workshare and long-lead procurement "gate" that Reid announced six or seven months ago. In other words, they've spent six months trying to agree a contract structure to continue with the existing design. How much technical progress has been made in that time, I don't know. I do know the carrier alliance has just laid off a bunch of people.
Don't buy the guff about de-risking either - with the exception of a particular system to do with weapons preparation, there is nothing particularly complex or developmental about the ships - they just happen to be much bigger than we're used to is all.
Astute had major cockups because :
a. The original contract went to a non-submarine builder (who subsequently bought that yard to make up for it) and then were subsequently bought out by another company who implemented a completely new CADAM system.
b. During all this, the shipyard (and MoD) expertise in submarine design and build wasted away. That's why there are around 40+ blokes from the US submarine builder (Electric Boat) at Barrow now.
c. The project management structure was being run from Bristol or Farnboro, remote from the guys actually doing the work.
d. As usual no-one was actually in charge!
Nimrod went tits up for some similar reasons, plus the project costing assuming that all the aircraft were exactly the same, when in fact each wing-box / fuselage combo is pretty much bespoke.
WEBF - don't even think about STOBAR. When it was looked at as an option seven years ago we found that from a deck operations (and therefore ship layout and size) perspective it was the worst of both worlds. You still had a large recovery area requirement, but rather than a (relatively) short cat, you needed a 500ft + runway & ski-jump, which dramatically reduced your parking area, thereby increasing the size of ship required for a given sortie rate. Oh and Typhoon would still struggle to recover safely on it as it doesn't address the limitations of the aircraft's glideslope performance.......
Thta said, lets hope they can crack on and do the detailed design work so we can cut steel and get on with the ship. Once it gets going, as I've said before, it's not a particularly complex vessel. Someone (that's you CDP) just needs to take a deep breath and say go. Write a contract such that if the Alliance drops a bollock they pay for it (and equally if MoD changes its requirements or doesn't answer quickly enough, they pay a penalty). Oh b*gger, that means committing to the aircraft.............