Well I dunno. Take F-22, demonstrator first flew in 1990, entry to service in 2005. Using same timetable for “F-29” would give is IOC date ~1999.
Also given that USAF was not going to order this aircraft in any case, how much market there would be for it? F-20 secured like four planes ordered after years of sales effort? Would FWS really much difference? Also it would run into same competition Gripen, Mirage 2000 etc export efforts did in the 90s/early 2000’s: cheap surplus F-16’s and MiG-29’s flooding the market.

No. Technology demonstrator is a far cry from an operational aircraft. You have to worry about things like getting useful endurance, carrying sensors and avionics, useful service life, carrying weapons – did X-29 even have any hardpoints? You’d essentially have to redesign the whole aircraft.
When Kestrel became Harrier, they had to redesign 90% of the aircraft, sometimes multiple times.

Cool, that was super-interesting. I had read about the ’80s evaluation but did not know any deeper details before that. That preference for Mirage 50 was strange, though that variant did have real radar, no?

The evaluation commission recommended the purchase of 24 J-35D but, for reasons that are unclear to this day, the government eventually ordered a second batch of 20 Saab 105XT jet trainer. They would serve as the main “air surveillance aircraft” into the 1980s and still carry out a large part of QRA duties today (!!!).

What?! Don’t you have Typhoons for QRA? Saab 105 can’t catch anything. 105 was one of the planes competing for Finnish Air Force advanced trainer requirement in the ’70s and FAF CinC threatened to resign if slow slug like Saab was selected.

I have been sitting in the cockpit of both planes, and can tell you that most of the time, a mig21f would not stand a chance meeting and Draken if he does not have help from groundcontroll radar.
Mig21 have very poor visibilty out compared to Draken, and you have to manually adjust sights and radar etc with a 1000 buttons and switches. If you really manage the workload in Mig 21’s and could have an alternative carier as an very god piano player, then you would crush the Draken with an mig21f in close air fight, according to the finish Draken mecanic I spoked with at the finish airforcemuseum. Very few mig21 pilots in finland became that godd with the plane.

According to experienced MiG-21 -pilot, 21F had quite good view out of the cockpit, but 21bis was considerably worse. Cockpit was somewhat confusing and pilots would sometimes make simple errors like deploying the brake chute when trying to fire the cannon etc.
Big advantage of MiG was carefree handling, it would not spin or stall violently unless you tried. Spin recovery was not even practiced. By contrast in Draken, pilot had to constantly monitor AoA to avoid superstall.

or a Mirage IIII as a Fin

wow thats sexy

Yeah, real nice – though that’s Mirage 2000.

But why does it have a Draken hull number? Mirage would be MR-202 or something.

FAF wanted Mirage in early ’60s, but it was much too expensive. So MiG-21 was acquired instead. FAF considered Mirages many times, but always they were found bit too pricey.

Too many crashes for a start. Draken had a much better safety record and a longer range which would have better suited the australian mission.

Both were still better choices than F-104.

Draken had terrible safety record in the first decade of its operation. Only when they began superstall training in the seventies it became acceptable.

I could not find an English language news piece about this, but today in somewhat surprising twist, Saab announced that its response for Finnish bid includes two Globaleye AEW&C aircraft, in addition to 64 Gripens.