Actually the F-4 wasn’t that bad. The program you should look at is the F-111 program. As originally sold there would be two variants of the F-111. The F-111A would be the AF’s ground based version. The F-111B would be the Navy’s carrier based version. I am not sure how many F-111Bs were produced but not more than a handful. Turned out that carrier operations were a lot tougher than the designers knew.
Oh well, 40 years later the military dreamers tried again with the F-35 with the same basic result - Naval and AF versions are totally different animals. I wonder if it will take another 40 years for another generation of super smart engineers to attempt this particular pipe dream again.
The Navy version of the F-111 became the F-14. The tail hook of the F-111 was a disaster. It is manually operated and rips the belly fairings off every time it is used. Not really condusive for flight deck operations.