That sounds great and all, but cancelling doesn't exactly speed things up either...
Obviously Navy, Marines, and Airforce all want different features, and requirement to the chassis renders it extremely frail (they had to cut a lot of weight for VTOL capability).
So considering that, it actually might be good idea to stop completely, fire all top airforce/navy/marine brass involved and restart as 3 separate projects from scratch, albeit using all the technology already developed.
Morale is already super low and it is hard to see bright future for something so overpriced, over budget, over engineered (in a bad way), and over politicized.
Morton Thiokol is a solid rocket company in the northwestern U.S. The Shuttle launched from the southwest U.S. The solid rockets, with tubes of propellant inside, had to be cut into sections to make the long journey. The joints were heavy (very bad for rockets), and a leaky joint destroyed the Challenger.
The horrible Air Force requirements made refurbishing very expensive and slow. Everything had been stripped of so much weight that it was too fragile and needed detailed inspection and repairs for each launch.
Morton Thiokol was crammed into the program to get Shuttle votes from their state's senators. The catch is that the crammin-crap-in process doomed the program. But if Morton Thiokol had threatened to cancel the program unless it was reinvented, they could have come out as a real rocket company supporting a fleet that launched every month. Honestly, the innovations SpaceX is coming out with could and should have been done by the Shuttle program, instead of the idiot business "leaders" chaining themselves to the worst possible ideas
* Linear aerospike engine
* Conformal carbon-composite LH2 tanks
* Integrated metallic TPS
* Subcontractors in 38 states and 122 congressional districts
The shuttle was a similarly foregone conclusion with a lot more money behind it. You're absolutely right that one of SpaceX's primary innovations, thus far, has simply been to not let politics get anywhere near the engineering process.
The SLS, built on Shuttle parts minus the spaceplane, launches first prototype in 2017. To what end, few can say.
If the military goes forward with the JSF, they are going to be stuck with a fundamentally poor platform for at least 20 to 30 years. This thing is wildly over budget, and will be wildy more expensive to operate than projected. This plane is supposed to be the backbone of US air power for decades.
If you scrap this program and start over, maybe it'll take 7-10 years to come up with 3 new aircraft for the 3 different roles. You sacrifice a decade to get something that will be far better for decades.
The military basically did exactly that when the F-111 program got off the rails in basically the same manner. It was supposed to be a fighter bomber for the Air Force and fleet air defense aircraft for the Navy but the Navy version ended up being too heavy and poor performing so they scrapped it, and ended up developing the F-14.
Honestly I would scrap the Marine Corps variant altogether. The USMC never goes where the Navy is not going to be so they could rely on close air support from the Naval variant. Sure a VSTOL aircraft could take off from a field somewhere but that capability simply doesn't provide enough benefit to offset the cost.
They are "pot committed" and can't kill the project. They made it kill proof...