Multirole fighters have been real and desirable for a long time. They are effective and are used by any nation that is able to build large numbers of aircraft in general. I fully agree with the decision to add general purpose missile pods. Also, aurora drive systems seem to not require wings at all, at most you'd want the design to be semi aerodynamic but even then there is no way that strike fighters would be flying so low as to actually enter the atmosphere, even if they appear to be 'on' the planet. The damned things are capable of flying at such incredible speeds that the tiny extra distance to dip into the atmosphere is totally irrelevant to them. They would probably just make the planet uninhabitable with the shockwaves from their passing.
Also regarding the f-35, I do agree that its a bit dumb to try to instantly go for a super multipurpose stealth fighter, thats not going to be viable for a while yet imo. The f-35 is supposed to be the first multirole stealth fighter that can also be mass produced. What? And then they wanted to try to have four variants with totally different propulsion systems have interchangeable parts. Thats frakking retarded, VTOL, VSTOL, and conventional aircraft will always have significantly different internal configurations. It was an idiotic pipe dream. I'd point out though that the government isn't yet under the thumb of the defense industry really, it was just optimism frakking everyone over. "hey lets develop a weapon that has absolutely every positive characteristic we want!" "sure!" This has happened before in human history, many times.
e: Editied to reflect what i was acutally intending to say, in my defense its like 2am here.