I don't doubt for a moment that the crevice (a filthy word) that the RN finds itself in wrt the FAA is exercising many minds in Fleet HQ and elsewhere. I think if the RN had retained the budget to order F35, it would have done so in a heartbeat - but remember where JCA came from. The original designation was FCBA (Future Carrier-Borne Aircraft) which was eventually canned and combined with FOAS to produce JCA -principally because Typhoon (and admittedly Astute) was gobbling up the procurement budget in the early noughties (a pretend filthy word), leaving no room for anything else.