LO,
You have my sympathy if you take it all so personally and you believe LM are lying to you and the rest of the world. In the years I was hanging around the plant in FW I'm afraid all I saw were very enthusiastic passionate people busting their nuts and working very long hours to make things happen as fast as they possibly could. Did you miss that bit out on your tour and go to some other Ministry of Truth type of facility that I never stumbled upon?
I didn't realise Typhoon was allowed to make excuses, and Rafale too (5 years late according to Wikipedia but you may have better info?), while LM aren't allowed any latitude. Arguably Eurofighter and Dassault really didn't do much in the way of advancing technology - all the RAF got in 2003 with the Typhoon was a twin-engine version of the F-16C of 1984. (That's a probably a bit unfair as the F-16 cockpit and hotas are quite well designed and intuitive, whereas the Typhoon cockpit and hotas are an absolute disgrace.) LM made a pretty good effort at designing 3 different airplanes simultaneously including the world's first STOVL supersonic stealth fighter. They were just a little bit more ambitious than the Europeans so you might want to cut them a little slack? Or not - up to you.
So far, all those literally hundreds of informed analysts from a dozen or more countries have verified and validated LM's air-air and air-ground capability figures and generally agreed with them. Not really sure what the pedigree of your challenge to their figures is other than a feeling in your waters after reading too much Sweetman and PPruNe. Again, I sympathise for you if you weren't given a full read-in to the appropriate compartments and given the capabilities brief to satisfy your general and passing interest while you were at FW. But I saw many a highly skeptical Secretary of State, Minister, MP, General, Admiral, dstl expert and more who did, and not a single one left the room thinking they'd been Potemkin-villaged or 'got to after a while'. I suppose LM might have been filling the air conditioning ducts with mind-altering hypnosis drugs. Maybe the moon landings were faked too - but if so how did the WW2 bomber get up there that the Sunday Sport found?
LM have wheeled airplanes off the production line, through final finishes and into the run stations for upgrade and completion for decades. I don't think they changed anything because they heard you were coming. If you're that much of an expert on organising aircraft assembly areas then you could probably make some serious dime by offering your services as a consultant to LM? One school of thought might be that a company that has built several thousand of the world's best fighters over the last 4 decades might know more than you about that sort of thing. Or not I suppose - believe what you will.
Respectfully,
Single Seat, Single Engine, The Only Way To Fly