Not necessarily. Check out the price of the new F-15s being built for the South Koreans and the Singaporeans ....in particular the F-15K for South Korea....they incorporate AESA radars and more modern engines. They are also quite expensive ...the 2006 cost for the F-15K (the one sold to S.Korea) was US$ 100 million. That is VERY expensive. The unit procurement cost for 187 airframes for the Raptor (that is once you strip out sunk cost) is US$ 177million. Had more been built (not cancelled ...even if we moved from the initial 700+ to the 300 something airframes) that would have made the unit procurement cost around 100m.
Yet, the advanced F-15s cannot supercruise (they actually have nothing close to the kinematics of the Raptor), have no stealth (even the so called Silent Eagle concept is a fraud ...you do not make something that in normal form has an RCSof 25m2 into a 'stealthy' airframe), does not have the fuel fraction, the combat persistence, etc etc etc of the Raptor.
What would be affordable would be to increase the number of Raptors to 300. Creating 'Super Eagles' would only create an airframe that would never be able to compete with a Raptor, but yet be very close to the price of the Raptor. A double negative! It's like being asked to buy a Lamborghini Gallardo for 150,000, or you can get a souped up Honda Civic for the 'cheaper' price of 100,000. While there is a savings, it would be best to just get the Bull. Furthermore, imagine you are buying a fleet of Gallardos for racing purposes, at which point the cost of the Gallardo would have been 90,000 due to the greater volumes involved. However, by cutting the numbers you pushed the price to 150,000 ....then someone in your organization decides you can save money by buying the super Civics for 100,000.
Maybe you should have stuck to the original number of Gallardos ...I mean Raptors.
As for the PakFa ....it is not the equal of the F-22 Raptor. It has immense potential, but it is no Raptor. However, if the Indian money keeps flowing to Russia for its development and production, it WILL be better than the F-35 and other legacy fighters.
Your comments are so true. The stealth Eagle actually carries less of a weapon load than a regular F-15.
Until more Raptors get built, the opposing planes don’t have to be better, they just have to be more numerous. The chinese could make something like that happen.