I think the US is past being "fair" with China, and I believe this is a very good thing. The Chinese are cheating in every arena with everything they've got, and being fair only plays into their hands.
When you find yourself saying "I ought to be able to generalize this", that's when you need to stop and just write the code you need to write NOW. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Yeah, the F-35 is delayed. Originally, Initial Operational Capability declarations for the services was supposed to be in 2010. Now it's 2018 and while the USAF and USMC declared IOC for their variants, the Navy still has not.
To correct and expand upon your point a bit. Yes, the Super Hornet isn't just a limited upgrade.
The Super Hornet is a bigger airframe. You can think of it as "what would happen if we scaled up a Hornet by about 15%?" New wing. New intake design. It required a development program and a flight test program of a kind that you do when you make a new airplane, not upgrade an old one.
The Super Hornet is much more capable. Greater endurance, can have an AESA radar, better ESM suite, better communications.
Yup, shape is the biggest thing you can control, then radar absorbing and reflecting materials.
One of the big anecdotes from the early days of stealth aircraft development in the 1970s is how at some wavelengths the Hopeless Diamond shape wasn't visible to range radars at all. During one test, the range radar guys went absolutely crazy trying to detect the shape -- which was a pole model, not even flying yet -- and were about to just give up, when suddenly, there it is on their screens, plain as day. Awesome, the Hopeless Diamond lost its stealth! Or not, because what really happened was a bird landed on the pole model.
You cannot know this unless you are read in to both programs, so this is further speculation. And if you were read into both programs (or either one) you wouldn't say things like this.
We cannot make an F-22 right now. A few years ago, Lockheed Martin was asked how much they thought it would cost to restart F-22 production. The cost was several billion dollars. Plus, the people with the intimate knowledge of how to build an F-22 are dispersed throughout the rest of the industry, retired, or deceased.