For this I will have to disagree, I shit on Indians a lot but on a purely technical basis, they are actually somewhat competent. On an action basis, well…
Their major problem is with expectations management, feature creep and believing their own BS. And I can’t believe I am actually about to defend the Tejas, but here we are. In the case of the Tejas, the 50 year timeline was feature creep, the delay in production was expectations management and it was all caused by them believing their own BS. But ultimately it is still a relatively competent aircraft for what it is, not for what they believe it to be.
Nowadays stealthiness isn’t really that difficult to achieve at least from structural design point of view, the radar dampening material will be a problem for them along with the engine. However, structure is set, pretty much doing what everyone does, converging on the f22, f35 and j35 structure, the same thing the Koreans and Turks are doing. Not sure what they will do for the materials side and for engines they will probably just do their usual, buying it from somewhere, unless Kaveri finally becomes de-meme-ified. Software side shouldn’t be as big of a problem.
Having said all this, I am not saying it will match US, China, Russia or hell even the Europeans. But having a 5th gen fighter isn’t out of the realm of possibility, reliability aside that is. A flying coffin is still something that flies.