In defence of Belfast
People sneer at the Belfast(slow), but should remember that its original purpose was to ferry components of the Blue Streak rocket to Woomera - in the far-off days when Britain had a space programme - and the rocket's diameter defined the fuselage diameter. This didn't really need "speed" as such, and an economical way of getting the aircraft relatively quickly lay in using the Britannia wing attached to the "fat" body. Short's in Belfast (town) being as always in need of work, the aircraft seemed "right" politically as well as in the rocket programme's timeline, though why 10 were ordered is a bit odd ...
That the aircraft programme was left hanging when the Blue Streak programme was crushed (an aerospace blunder) isn't a surprise, and cancelling that as well wouldn't have gone down well, now would it?
Belfast thus was inherited by the RAF, rather than specified by MoDAir, and so might well have been looked down on by Their Airships (pure speculation on my part, of course).
Surely it wasn't a bad, or even poor, aircraft in itself, just misused. That others were better adapted to Air Force needs is by the way ...
PS. Never even seen one myself, so no axe to grind. Now the lineal descendant of the Hamilcar glider inherited by Blackburn from General Aircraft's a whole other can of worms ... But wasn't that a Brown Job thing ?