A family friend who flew the F-4 articulated my perception by saying the F-4 was proof that a brick could fly.
Ahh...but the F-14 could really dogfight. But its Achilles Heel was those TF30 engines that were not designed for a fighter. I worked on A-7s which used the TF30-P408, but when we got the A-7E, they switched to a TF41, a thermally goverened engine that was also used in the Royal Navy F-4 Phantoms, and I have been told that was still a pretty hot plane but had better fuel consumption and less smoke than the J79s.
The problem with it is that it ran hot and cracked turbine blades were an issue, so we had to use a boroscope on a regular basis to inspect. We would remove the igniter in one of the cans, and feed the horoscope down to the turbine, and someone else would use a big socket wrench to turn the turbine so you could examine them one at a time.
LOL we did have a guy who put that expensive (again, this was the late Seventies) boroscope too close and the turbine blade which chopped off the tip of the horoscope as the turbine was rotated manually by the other guy, and we had to remove the engine as we had no way to remove it back in those days.