Apologies for being a bit behind - I've been traveling and pretty much off line for the last week+ - but I want to add my observations (and I invite Turbine D and Engines to disagree or pile on as they see fit).
First off, over my career in turbine engines I've spent time working with all three - Pratt, GE, and Rolls. As good friend of mine put it before he retired "The worst engine company in the world is the one you're dealing with today".
Due to the relative market share, I've spent the majority of my time the last decade working GE (although I've still spent significant time and effort dealing with Pratt and Rolls). I think the genesis of the problems with the F135 started 25 years ago - when the development began for the 777 EIS engines. At that time, Pratt was already betting heavily on the geared fan concept - as a result the PW4000/112" engine for the 777 was a realtively minor development of the PW4000/94" (767 and 747-400). Meanwhile, GE committed hugely to a totally new engine - the GE90. Since that time, Pratt has continued to pursue their geared fan committment, while paying relatively little attention to the rest of the engine, while GE has continued to incrementally improve all aspects - the fan, compressor, and turbine - and done that to great effect.
GE personnel have told me, pretty much in so many words, that there is little new in the CFM LEAP - they've basically just taken everything that went into the GEnx (and GE90) and scaled it down to CFM size. GE also discovered - rather painfully - during the GEnx program that some of their aero development tools needed some refinement - refinement that has been successfully demonstrated in the GEnx PIP programs.
In short, GE has continued to successfully refine the entire engine technology, while Pratt has let their compressor and turbine technology stagnate while they chased the geared fan holy grail. Something that is all too apparent in their commercial market share where GE/CFM has well over half the market and Pratt is small single digits
Or to put it a bit differently - GE has been able to spread their incremental development costs over a mix of military and commerical engines, while Pratt no longer has a meaningful commerical base
Combined with Pratt's long standing issues with providing a geometrically stable compressor case (something I posted about many pages back), I believe the F135 problems were not just predictable, they were inevitable.
