I’d rather see the F35 side talk to these seemingly weak flight characteristics before they attack the study author bias.
The unit cost death spiral is practically a law of nature. For many years the succeeding systems have had much higher unit costs and we have been constrained to buy fewer and fewer units. The same arguments were made about the F-15, 16 and 18 replacing F-4s, A-4s, A-7s, etc., etc.
The authors do not seem to accommodate in their argument the revolution in military affairs that has increased lethality and efficiency by orders of magnitude. The question is, does this increased capability compensate for the decrease in units? Here in amateur-land the answer seems to be yes. The accuracy of bombs and missiles has reduced the number of sorties required to destroy a target by several orders of magnitude. What required hundreds if not thousands of sorties to destroy in WWII now requires 1 or 2. That ought to count for something in their analysis.
Finally, unmanned systems are cheap enough to field lots of units, so we don’t see him complaining about that, do we?