I agree that we're not going to see carrier autoland become standard for many years... but "many years", as in multiple decades, happens to be the lifespan of carriers and aircraft designs.
A point of clarification: There is an autoland system on USN carriers today, based on a ship-mounted radar. It is not the system that's being tested under the UCAV program, which is based on differential GPS. Simply, the new system tells the aircraft exactly where the landing spot will be, relative to its own position, when it hits the deck. Since the job of the FCS on the aircraft at all times is, basically, to keep the jet on a commanded flightpath, the FCS is not doing anything unusual to guide to the landing point.
Everything updates at a rate of 100 times a second or so. As a navy aviator/engineer put it to me: "It's a high-demand task for a human but for a computer it's like watching paint dry."
Safety is where it gets interesting. Nobody is going to let the UAV near the boat (under operational conditions) until safety is not measurably different from piloted ops, at any time. And by "at any time" we mean calm, clear daylight conditions. However, the autoland system does not even know if it is dark, turbulent or rainy. If it has equivalent safety in normal conditions...
Blasphemy, I know. As for "why doesn't the AF do it?", well, the AF does not burn tons of fuel, time and airframe life practicing landings.
Will it be there at F-35 IOC? No. Can we say it won't be there during the life of the program? Also no.
Engines: It's not that 'F-35 is stupid, people who designed it are stupid, it's all wrong or stupid.' It's that the program has been oversold and its risks understated, and that the Plan B options are being eliminated one by one as the program continues to slip to the right and overrun costs.
There may be one, two or even three worthwhile airplanes that come out of the program, but it is the leadership of the program that has led to the criticism outside.
If you want to stop that, pass the message up the chain of command that the people talking in public need to get out of denial mode, because right now the baseline plan seems to be to sell the program to the politicians while blaming the customer for the problems.