A vast improvement would be made, regardless of any other consideration, if the RAF would pay for competent computer consultancy (alliteration yet!) rather than turning to BAe etc and saying 'here's 50 squillion quid, please hire a computer geek'.
Unfortunately, from my very limited experienece of 'design committee' style work, what you get is a civil servant chair who knows very little, some company men who know about the same, a few tech rep types who know which side the butter is on, and a bunch of RAF guys who eventually die of frustration or start spin-off businesses to supply the glaring need. Due to poor business acumen their company folds inside 5 years.
(There is also a fair amount of 'free lunch' in this - I, personally, was always more than a little annoyed at how cheaply the company thought I could be bought, and how readily my colleagues went for it).
The home PC boom in the 80's saw huge numbers of aircrew getting into programming and stuff, the odd square peg made it to the square hole (others pretended to be square so they could avoid flying), the net result being that whilst the RAF quite rightly (in my view) distrusts complete automation/computation in favour of man hour intensive skill development (which is why we're the best, naturally) it lost out on the ability of computing to streamline decision making - and perhaps more importantly, to provide even the weaker practitioners with a safety net that ensured a basic level of competence.
I would be amazed if some of the R job were not open to computerisation, requiring little more than an O level standard of ability - the problem being that the RAF subcontracts that side of things to people who don't understand it themselves, it is 'staffed' by people who have no idea beyond an inherent distrust of geeks.
As I (used to) lean out of radar, on all those sorties where we concentrated on wet stuff, I couldn't help but wonder why so many people in 'the loop' were gut-feeling location, course, depth, speed when it's trigonometry.... computers are good at trig - I used to wonder why the various players weren't maybe looking at a computer generated set of solutions, picking the most likely, instead of doing it all from scratch?
Don't get me started on 8" floppy disks...what idiot settled for that as a programming method (and as my ex-colleagues will agree, continual RE-programming method) - when solid state memory devices were on the commercial market?
My vote is for two platforms - one does everything, including taking old mates for nice jollies... being a really old git this is probably now only 2 or 3. The second platform is highly computerised, required a small crew, and goes for say 75% of the possible take. You do not need full capability on every trip, you do need one of the right type of platform (and crew) for every trip.
Out.