> However you can't just say that a combat aircraft is better than an other. It highly depends on the kind of mission considered (Air defense, Close air support, Ground strike, etc...), and on the underlying warfare infrastructure (refueling tankers, AWACS, jamming vectors, etc...).
So maybe they should've published a spreadsheet instead, or an interactive, explorable chart. There are ways for effectively communicating multidimensional spaces of trade-offs, and I'm saddened that those ways are almost never used.
This won't happen for a combat aircraft, because most of the true detailed performance is kept secret (for obvious strategic -and commercial- reasons).
Full data - sure. But to the extent of information you can publish, comparisons could be done in a way that are not misleading. Otherwise, why publish?
So maybe they should've published a spreadsheet instead, or an interactive, explorable chart. There are ways for effectively communicating multidimensional spaces of trade-offs, and I'm saddened that those ways are almost never used.