I'm talking entirely hypothethically, I don't see this happening at all really but just as a thought exercise, in a scenario where especially Turkey - Nato relations continue to sour, a Pakistan - China - Turkey joint naval taskforce in Indian ocean would shake the world a quite bit.
If it flies and finds things needs to be fixed, these are problems what would have occured at a later point and would delay the project. If such issues are found earlier by a couple years because we flew a prototype early that would accelerate the project compared to other approach. But yes this...
First prototype was made befofe CDR was finished so there isn't much point to making more prototypes before that. KF21 was at a different stage of its development lifecycle.
Gripen has F414. America wouldn't sell that to us. But F414 has 60KW electric output or so that i remember, which is on par with F16 so it can have a good radar and electronics for A2A, but alas, not gonna happen.
TAI is being used as a locomotive to acquire technology and capabilities for indigenization, it was many times expected to use local parts where it could readily buy existing products and faced delays as a result. But some of these setbacks prepared infrastructure for capabilities we have today...
