Or they used metrics to solve the question which method is more effective and will likely draw up an rfp to multiple vendors based on this choice in the future. Some lulls are designed to allow competition to catch up.

You got many inactive aircraft on the list. 4, 8, 12, 23, 24, 37, and 48. 21, 40, 41, and 42 are much too similar. 8 and 43 are the same plane. 47, 48, 49, 50, and 52 are all too similar. 6, 7, and 31 are also too similar. 4, 12, and 22 are also too similar. 19 is retired, but the EA-6B Prowler is not.

You also left out some good ones:

Boeing B-52G Stratofortress
Cessna A-37 Dragonfly
Chance-Vought A-7 Corsair II
Chengdu J-20
Dassault Mirage F.1
Dassault Super Etendard
General Atomics Q-1 Predator
General Atomics Q-9 Reaper
Grumman EA-6B Prowler
Grumman F-14A Tomcat
Hawker Hunter
McDonnell-Douglas A-4 Skyhawk
Northrop-Grumman B-2 Spirit
Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird (retired, never forgotten)
Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk (retired, but legendary)
Lockheed-Martin AC-130U Spectre
Mikoyan MiG-21 Fishbed
Mikoyan MiG-19 Farmer
Rockwell B-1B Lancer
Shenyang J-8II Finback
Sukhoi Su-22M Fitter
Sukhoi Su-24M Fencer
Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot
Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut (again retired, but legendary)
Sukhoi PAKFA
Tupolev Tu-22M3 Backfire
Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack
Xian JH-7A
Yakovlev Yak-130

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-09-03/news/53522796_1_defence-equipment-brahmos-air-defence-system

Brahmos to be exported to Vietnam, Indonesia, and Venezuela

The only way Tejas is going to be 100% indigenous is by picking up engine production, which EF consortium can do. Dassault cannot.

I always thought the process was flawed, not the competition itself. If both teams had developed just subsets of the design then you would have had a much more refined product albeit with some delay to the finished product. As an engineer at Boeing, I would have wanted the access to LockMart’s VTOL plan. As an engineer at LockMart, I would have wanted Boeing’s carbon nanotube materials technology. I didn’t care for the guppy mouth, but if the choice was between subcomponents, that would have never been the issue. In reality both companies oversee the production of the final product!

This whole idea could have been pushed further yet. P&W and GE would have continued to work on their respective engines. An argument could have been made for the USN version to utilize multiple engines with P&W, GE, and Honeywell all vying for their version of what that meant. Would it really be bad that the engine layout changed, but all three versions still shared components? In the end the airframe wasn’t the expensive parameter, but it’s the one that borked up the engineering.

Laser gyro and GPS give you your current position, azimuth and elevation are known, the ground is already mapped so if you have direction you know maximum distance, and going by known parameters you have a pretty good guesstimate for distance. Add in you know the limits of your sensory, references of your target between snapshots, perhaps secondary detectors off board, a towed sensor in some cases…