With attitudes like that we might as well give up and have no reasonable expectations at all, why not just give a supplier a blank sheet where they can fill in the price, delivery date and specifications and be done with it.
I don't know why people need to be reminded that this whole JSF adventure started out as a follow up for our legacy fighters which was not going to be more expensive (overall) to operate than the fighters it was supposed to replace, was going to be easy to maintain, was going to have a good survivability rate ,certainly those that where supposed to replace the Harriers and A10's, and would have a performance level at least as good as the F16/F18 while providing top of the line stealth characteristics.
It under performs massively on most of these promises while being ludicrously expensive and ridiculously over time.
The idea that this is just how things are in the defense industry is a non-answer, it is only so because too many people involved want it to be like that (re. the industry) or are just to inept to make reasonable decisions when it comes to projects like these (politicians, and even some in the DoD).