> Can't fly fast, can't fly far, can't carry much load, can't dog fight, needs ton of maintenance and may or may not be invisible.
that is exactly all the "can't"s the F35 ancestor - Yak-141 [1] - was designed with. All the stealth and quasi-fighter related capabilities of F35 are just bolt-ons onto that design in an attempt to mitigate the "can't"s and to stretch if even just a bit the very limited otherwise capabilities of that design. The only "can" in that design, its raison d'être, was the VTOL with swiveling nozzle (which can't even vector in flight). While that swiveling nozzle is a great thing for a country with no capabilities to build real aircraft carriers, it is a thing born in the pre-stealth age, and thus naturally compromised the stealth (especially in IR) of F35 as there is no way of making it "flat rectangular", like for example on F-22 and B-2, at sane (even by DOD standard) costs.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Lockheed-Martin-fund-Yak-141/a...