Orca,
I don't think it's as black and white as you clearly think it is. The US Marines have wanted and needed the capability to operate strike aircraft from austere bases near the frontline over and over again - from island hopping across the Pacific in WWII, to Vietnam, operating off roads in Desert Storm, Bagram and FARP'ing from helicopter sites near Al Kut in OIF. Even the UK has needed / used the capability including the tin strip in the Falklands and Kandahar etc etc. Having long range is good in one sense, but that means it takes even longer to react to an urgent call for fires. Forward basing has a time and a place.
JSF has been designed from the outset to have a very small logistics footprint when deployed - it's a Key User Requirement in the contract, defined by the number of C-17 loads/aircraft. So people have thought about this and we've defined a requirement based (presumably) on a logistics footprint that we can support.
You're also thinking in a very legacy mindset if you think JSF will be holding off waiting for CJ's etc. This is a very stealthy aircraft indeed. You can operate it like an F-117 or B2 and pretty much go where you want, when you want. You're going to want to avoid using afterburner like the plague as the last thing a stealthy aircraft wants to do on a dark night is light the sky up with a huge flame (or highlight yourself on IRST) so there won't be much 'gating' from Flankers either.
If you care to read anything about the huge effort that has gone into developing unified control laws for the F-35B, you'll discover that it is indeed incredibly simple to hover. There's no nozzle lever, and the jet will do everything for you. Autoland, for a conventional F-35C, relies entirely on JPALS working, and as far as I know it's slipped further right than our required IOC. And you're still going to have to train for a reversionary approach in the event that your primary recovery aid goes down. So at some point you'll need to find a training aircraft to teach all our Hawk pilots how to land on boats etc (unless you're advocating doing your first carrier landing in an F-35?). I am also led to believe that the design for the first carrier is pretty much frozen and it's going to be a STOVL boat unless we pay a huge amount of cash, so you could say the ship's already sailed....
You're obviously quite right that aircraft get heavier over their lives, but engines also get bigger and more efficient. The original Harrier engine from the 60's couldn't lift a II+, but over the years the engine has been improved and you can now hover a heavy radar bird in the Persian Gulf with a couple of LGBs and fuel tanks. Similarly the F136 engine is already more powerful than the F135 and I'd bet my house that the boys at GE/P&W/RR can figure out how to get more thrust from their engines over the life of the F-35B. So I don't see your point there either.
I really don't particularly mind which variant of F-35 the UK chooses to buy as they're both fantastic. But I'm assuming that some clever people will have done some exhaustive studies into which model is better for our particular requirements. If the decision they've come to is that the -B is the one, do you really think the best thing to do is to sit around whining that it hasn't got xxx of fuel, when it has more than enough to fulfil its intended roles? You may well be able to think of a particular scenario where the -C has an advantage over the -B, but if it's not a scenario that the UK has a requirement to be able to fulfil then it's a bit irrelevant.
Finally, Mr Grim - it sounds like your assuming that we're going to attack an enemy who's just clever enough to harden his assets to withstand a 1000lb bomb, but just stupid enough not to harden them to withstand a 2000lb. If it's a hard target, then you're probably looking at Storm Shadow from the GR4 or Typhoon boys. But for the other 99% of targets out there, a 1000lb will usually do just fine - check out the stats from OIF.
Regards,
Single Seat, Single Engine, The Only Way To Fly