As always, buying a used previous gen flagship is the best value.

You have to keep inflation in mind. 550 would be 450 2019 dollars.

Not really a countermeasure, but the scalping certainly proved that there is a lot of people willing to buy their stuff at high prices.

F35 is guaranteed to be better than a “6th generation” Chinese plane and they can be upgraded anyway. And it’s actually very successful now with a very cheap per plane cost.

It’s more about sensors and communication, there’s no reason you can’t have f35 use drones and stuff. But the better plane will see and target the enemy first. And it can operate without GPS. In other words it’s better to have 3000 f35s flying missions plus a bunch of drones. Being able to deliver a lot of firepower first is a huge deal.