Beagle, depends what you call wasted? The budget for the TriStar wing pods was donated to the VC10!
That was, of course, in the days when there was a tanker force.
The real politics behind the MMR development are unknown to me. However, it did work and, if the TriStar fleet had received only a tiny fraction of the investment on FSTA, we could have had 2 squadrons of updated TriStar and kept Nimrod and Harrier and have 5 Billion £ change!*
* Numbers estimated
OAP