I bet a lot of issues in that period end up back at the feet of unreliable and underpowered engines. The only recourse would have been to slow development - ie designing planes around proven/existing engines, but the appetite for risk and ambition of the time meant design compromises that might not have made it past the proof-of-concept stage ended up in service.
The Allies had a fair number of WW2 designs that died on the drawing board or prototype phase simply because logistically, it wasn't worth upsetting the existing apple cart to add in a new design that was only slightly better.
You can have a great engine in a bad plane, but you can't have a great plane with bad engines.
so basically your prototype that engages in New Toy Syndrome without much safety concern.
I mean, the 50s were a time of almost wartime-levels of risk-taking, without the wartime scarcity worries. You wouldn't say, stop P-40 or early P-51 production to crank out a couple wings worth of P-75 Eagles just to try out mid-1943, but apparently in 1949, the Navy was just fine throwing that many pilots away.
