What I cannot get my head round is why do we need VTOL in the first place? I totally get it for a land based operations where you would be operating off unprepared strips in dispersed locations.
But surely the role of the Naval fighter is to protect the fleet and any landings that may take place, they would operate from a Carrier safely away from the beach head out of harms way and not normally deploy ashore.
Now the Sea Harrier I got, the ships they deployed from were not large enough to support conventional fixed wing aircraft, so the ability to VTOL was a requirement, but with these new Carriers they are sufficently large enough to carry conventional aircraft, to constrain them to simply carrying a VTOL type just seems to me as a retrograde step, as the ability to hover is really redundant with the capability the increased ships size brings.