Wiki is a little unfair in the dismissal of the Lightning’s 1950’s radar etc.
Considering that the weapons system originated from late 1940s research (as did the aerodynamics) it had remarkable capability. There was not much room for a high-power radar, only a small radar dish, but the processing logic and anti-jam capabilities were first rate. Also, remember that all of the computing was analogue, resistors, capacitors and gear wheels – and they kept working at 6g!
The missiles similarly had exceptional capability considering their vintage. There are many stories of the US attempting to ‘keep’ a Firestreak homing head. The warhead was not a puny 9 lb hand grenade as in the early AIM 9s – it was a 65 lb version, and the fusing had brains to ‘seek-out’ the flight deck. Red Top and its advanced computing improved on this and provided a modest head-on capability – probably to address a specific threat from Blinder / Kitchen.
The aircraft / system kill-ratio, the overall reliability, was impressive and better than the early performance of Phantom / Sidewinder / AIM 7.
IIRC one of the U2 intercepts, 74,000 ft, involved the aircraft in a near miss; the Lightning radar failed (a pressurization weakness above 64,000 ?) thus the missile intercept was completed with the ‘gun’-sight. At a late stage, the pilot realized that this was a pure pursuit course – aiming directly at the target, which together with reduced pitch control effectiveness at very high altitude / speeds resulted in a close pass – Lightning inverted and pulling hard downwards.
Comparisons should be restricted to like v like in the era. After flying a French Mirage pilot on an ‘evaluation’ exchange – we flew the Mirage 3B in return, he asked why the Lightning required two engines as it in his opinion one engine provided most of the required low and medium level performance. In latter years, the Mirage was a better ‘system’, but this was 10 years after the Lightning had been in service and many years of failed support for developments – Oh for a T55 with 4 fuselage mounted missiles, two under wing AIM 9K, and guns.