Nowadays we do get critical articles about programs like the Joint Strike Fighter, but often they seem a little bit besides the point, for example comparing it to seventies design paradigms. The lightweight fighter mafia is emphasizing dogfighting, visual identification and gun kills, from an era when missiles were very unreliable and there was no stealth.
I guess it would require a lot of expertise and access to rare information, to be able to evaluate the JSF on its own merits. Stillion and Sweetman have been the most interesting reads.
I think the problem with X-33 was that it was too big and risky for an experimental-only platform. If you want to develop things like aerospike engines or composite multilobe tanks, you should first have ground tests and then relatively small demonstrators using a lot of off the shelf technology. It makes no sense to bet so much stuff on a multi-faceted big expensive program that can fail when any of it components doesn't deliver.
Or if you want to build something big, either use proven technology or retire risk in smaller programs first.
I guess people were emulating Apollo and the Space Shuttle. They had high performance but were not flexible or low cost, for a reason.