How much of the "not working" was actually true?
They had built several of the early airframes, and had been testing them for years, so I find it hard to believe that the basic airframe had too much wrong with it.
On the mission system, again they had been building it and testing it for years. So even if not quite all the I's were dotted and T's crossed, they had some semblance of an MPA.
Could it not have been brought into service in a limited manner and then modded with the bits that were not yet up to speed? C130J was quite limited when it came into service. Not aircraft, but another big equipment program, Ptarmigan, the equipment that went out of service a year or two back was a very different beast to the one introduced 20 years previously in terms of capability.
Or were the issues too fundamental to do even that?