A wing change on the JFT would tentamount to 3-4 years of research and testing and 3 years to build. It would also send a wrong message to our potential buyers and you do not want to confuse the small number of buyers that you have wriggled away from thew big two. Plus at 16 planes a year and a replacement need exceeding 150 fighters the time lag would be too much. Lastly it would divert resources and man power away from Project Azm which is the last thing we want to do.
The research for Atlas Cheetah is done and if Denel is to be believed the Jigs are already in place with the SA team. As such time nad money input would be halved. We can have commonality of avionics in the platform and other savings due to commmonality. However, the crunch question is whether the effort is worth the gain from Time money and capabilities it brings forward. This was why IAsked the question from
@Bilal Khan 777 but he has probabaly not seen the post.
A