RE: Ok, I might be talking outta my.....
No, but the whole Eurofighter concept suffers from the usual joint project problem - the Europeans - whereas SAAB had one customer to please and didn't have to waste billions on paying off fat eurocats. Also, the Grypen is a much lighter interceptor and is arguably no better than the original BAe P.106 design the RAF rejected as being too puny to fulfill the role that Typhoon now must. In fact, the closest any off-the-shelf design got to the RAF requirement was the F/A-18, which is no real surprise as the F/A-18 is designed to fulfill the oversea fighter and strike role of the old Phantom, the last real multi-role all-in-one fighter the RAF had. The original RAF requirement can be simplified to a modern, cheaper-to-run and more capable Phantom replacement, something the Tornado has not been able to quite do.
The thing is BAe has shown before with projects like the Hawk what can be accomplished when just left to get on with doing a job. Compare the Hawk program, which is probably the most succesful advanced jet trainer program around, with competitiors like the Alpha Jet, the project BAe luckily opted out of as it saw what a mess the French and Germans were making of it. The bigger, more costly Hawk has outsold the Alpha more than two-to-one, and is still in production and development whereas Alpha production has long since ceased. BAe is, despite what the loons like to think, not full of stupid people.
Or the MBT80 program, another euromess involving the usual culprits, France and Germany. The failure of that program after several years and nobody knows how many millions eventually forced the UK to go with Challenger, a design originally (and conveniently?) drawn up by BAe for the Iranians. Luckily this wasn't such a bad thing, though the fire control system was too slow, and it went on to score 300+ kills for no losses in the First Gulf War (not even the Abrams matched that ratio). The much criticised fire control system also got the Challenger a place in the history books with the longest range kill tank-versus-tank kill on record (5.1km using HESH). Not bad for a "clearance bargain" desing. Finally, the Army got what it really wanted in the all-British Challenger 2, which was selected over the other decendents from the failed MBT80 program, the Leopard 2 and the truly awful Le Clerc.
So it seems that BAe are quite good at judging the armoured European failures. They foresaw the problems in MBT80, and they guessed the multi-national SP70 project was going to fail and came up with the much better AS-90 self-propelled howitzer in their spare time. They also got Hawk not just right but very right, to the tune of an awful lot of foreign orders. However, it must have been glaringly obvious to the same BAe people that the Eurofighter requirement was going to have to fit too many different national requirements.
As soon as you introduce any of our European partners to a project, let alone the catastrophe of letting Dassault in, the costs go up in quadratic amounts as the design is bastardised to suit everyones' needs, and everyone feels they have to make changes or insist on different capability if only for reasons of national pride. BAe know this, which begs the question did they happily sign off on Tranche 1 knowing full well the RAF would have to come back for either massive post-sale upgrades or additional upgraded jets? Just how much money did BAe really drag out of the MoD and the Europeans to join in the Eurofighter party, and how much have they been promised for fixing the resulting mess for the RAF?