vesicles
Colonel
With that being said, there is something to be said and gained from acquiring tribal knowledge of jet fighter development. Even if Tejas turns out to be a lemon, a very expensive lemon even, the knowledge and skills acquired would play a key role for their future domestic fighter programs.
In my opinion, it is not knowledge or skills that the Indians lack. They have access to virtually every technology that they seek. Additionally, India has many many highly talented engineers and scientists. So it's not about the actual hardware.
I think it's mainly a philosophical issue, the way the Indian government approaches things. In my opinion, they focus so much on the flashy exterior but lose sight of the mundane foundation. While doing that, they manage to waste all their talent on a wild goose chase.
If they don't change their mindset, any hard-learned technical experience and lessons will be continually wasted on aimless chase of "glory" and "victory".
We can tell that this is what is happening because almost every weapons development program in India suffers the same problems and setbacks. And the same trend has been continuing for the past 50-60 years without any meaningful change. If it is merely technic issues, such long time should be enough for them to accumulate very solid technical knowhow to achieve significant improvement. But they are still at a standstill in most of their technical programs. So it is not technical knowledge, but philosophical mindset.
If they don't think hard on this, things won't change one bit even if their programs are staffed entirely by western experts. The talent and technical knowhow will still be wasted on aimless and meaningless chase of glory.