F-16 in place of a Hog would be a big mistake. The hog was designed from the cannon out to be a close air support for infantry. It is slow and TOUGH. It has a titanium tub for the hog driver, twin outboard engines, self sealing tanks that can take a 20mm round, and other survivability features. The F-16 is made to kill fast things in the air, and get away from other fast things in the air.
All that you said is true. But the AF has tried to kill it, at the very least move them all to the NG, several times.
My interpretation of this is political. The AF tries to move the A10 out of active service so that when things get political, the AF uses its political capital to get more procurement, the army has to use its political capital to try to get the AF to keep the A10. The army has never done well in procurement fights at the capital, but since the end of the cold war has done especially badly.
Shortly after the USAAF (that first A being Army) became the USAF, they forgot that the whole point of winning the battle in the air was to help win the battle on the ground.
The next year they changed the rules, and the F-16s won the competition again!
Not to mention the fact that F-16s are really good at protecting slower things in the air as well as shooting down slower things in the air. They aren't half bad at delivering large packages to small hostile areas on the ground either.