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Haha - I hear you.

My dad was stationed in Puerto Rico in the sixties (Marines) and they flew F-4s out of there. He loved those machines and I think I inherited my appreciation from him. F-4s’ve got those great droopy tail fins and turned up tips on their wings. Just amazing machines with Hollywood great looks. I often wonder about the degree to which the designers are thinking of beauty rather than pure function when they’re drawing up the designs...

I guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. I never liked the looks of the Phantom but it’s predecessor, the F-101 Voodoo was a real beauty.

Now I always thought the WWII Spitfire was the prettiest plane ever tho the ME-109 and the P-40 were also beautiful.

Of current planes the F-15 looks the best to me.

The F-4 had power and swagger but little beauty. Burdened by a demanding set of requirements, the F-4 design had an excess of aerodynamic kludges and compromises that needed two big, thirsty, smokey engines to shove it through the sky. Ugly but durable, the F-4 performed well enough and had a long enough production run to become the iconic third generation American fighter aircraft.

Yet, as the reform-minded "fighter mafia" showed, the F-4 was inherently flawed as a dogfighter and suffered too many avoidable losses to smaller and more nimble MiG-21s over Vietnam. For a successor to the F-4, John Boyd, an Air Force pilot turned Pentagon procurement officer, rejected a wish list of requirements in favor of a performance equation based on his authoritative energy-maneuver theory of fighter combat. This offered aircraft designers a wider scope for their talents. The result was the superb F-16, with the runner up becoming the Navy's F-18.