Back to the opening post for a second. Among the high risk, poorly performing acquisitions you listed the Collins class submarine, this is actually a platform I have considerable real world experience with, not as a designer or builder but as a maintainers and upgrader, i.e. I worked on the solutions to the issues.
Something that really surprised me working on the class was how far off the mark the public reports were, for example a news paper report would state that only one boat was in service when I knew for fact it was two and the boat they said was at sea was actually in the shed being stripped for its MCD (mid cycle docking or two yearly refit and upgrade). Working where I did provided some insight to the actual performance and availability of the class, if when and why they were unavailable, for example two boats were pulled from service early for their FCDs during the mid to late 2000s because efficiency drives within naval engineering had resulted in insufficient qualified crews (technical sailors specifically) being available to have more than three submarines in service. To see the company I proudly worked for slandered weekly or more often in the media and even parliament for issues that were caused directly by government policy was beyond demoralising.
Another little known, but actually public domain, issue was that much of the bad news was deliberately engineered for political and capability reasons. On the political side the entire project was seen as the baby of the then leader of the opposition when he was defence minister, though he had moved on to another role before steel was cut perceived problems with the project were seen as a very convenient tool to discredit him with.
On the capability side the was a very influential senior officer who was responsible for "fixing the boats". He was a talented career submariner who took the opportunity to not just fix the teething problems but to upgrade them with the latest and greatest capabilities. The original combat system by Rockwell was a mess and a perfectly good enough German system was selected to replace it but the Admiral was able to convince the government that the vastly more expensive USN AN/BYG-1 from the Virginia class, even though it entailed very challenging integration issues, was the only way to go. This was something he admitted to in his interviews for the book "The Collins Class Submarine Story: Steel, Spies and Spin" by Peter Yule and Derek Woolner, he would of state problems or even create them to justify fitting the submarines with new capabilities that didn't even exist when the type was designed, they were in actual fact upgrades not fixes.
What is not well know or understood is the class actually had higher levels of availability then the majority of foreign designs, longer range, greater stealth (at patrol speeds they were undetectable) and ironically the issue with their noise levels at high speed was actually a factor of them being capable of higher speeds than the hull was designed to be silent at i.e. the bow cylindrical array sonar was raised to provide greater coverage which forced a compromise in water flow over the hull, the powers that be conveniently forgetting the agreed compromise when it suited them. Even then this was addressed through using USN tech from the Virginia class meaning that this much maligned type that was "as loud as a rock concert" went from meeting or exceeding requirements to absolutely smashing them. The majority of issues encountered on the first of class had been addressed by the time the second boat commissioned with the third being even better, the next two were completed with many improvements and upgrades lifted from the USN that effectively made them an improved sub class until this mods were fitted to the earlier boats during FCD and the final boat was improved further again. Even so boat two and three, in their initial configuration performed exceptionally on exercise with the USN, boat three even being lost by a SH-60F Oceanhawk that followed it out of Pearl Harbour (in violation of the exercise rules) once it dived they lost it.
Over all the project has been a political football and a media circus with very little fact ever seeing the light of day. Most issues reported today or old news and totally irrelevant as they were fixed years ago, most new issues are due to it being an aging platform with the associated wear and tear as well as obsolescence issues. If someone other than the former defmin had been leader of the opposition or something else had come up at the time there would never have been the bad press and all else being the same people would see the project for the success it has been.
