The competing solutions were offered only by other bloated MIC corporations with similar habits of feeding from the government pork barrel.
I've been on both sides of this tendering process, and it's absurd how horrifically inefficient it makes things. Small, agile, and capable vendors are literally excluded from the process and can't even begin to meet the criteria for acceptance. But... that's the point. It's not about cost-efficiency or product quality, but about keeping a few well-connected companies happy.
Try to look at things from the perspective of someone like Elon Musk, or a leader you admire from any FAANG or successful modern company.
Now tell them with a straight face that you're going to keep using computer hardware from the 1990s for 20+ years without an upgrade because... the paperwork is too hard.
You'd be laughed at, and then booted from the organisation for gross incompetence.
In the military, that's normal way things are done.
Imagine running Facebook, Google, or Amazon on 20 year old hardware. Picture that for a second.
Or if you want space-rated flight hardware, imagine SpaceX using something from the 1990s for Falcon 9 rockets because of red-tape.
You're rationalising nonsense. You're trying to tell me that it's good and proper that America and its allies are going to war with planes that have flight hardware that is equivalent to what I wear on my wrist to tell me the time, but uses 100,000x the power, takes up 500x the volume, and costs 1,000x as much.