>decades of prior wind tunnel testing on the folding rotor concept

Oof, I wish I had a job like that.

> continuation of a long-standing design work with Bell.

sunk investment. The success - it made into production in meaningful numbers - of V-22 means that design will be beaten to death.

Even though Bell X-22 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFdV5CVXGGw) was much better as prop VTOL than V-22, and for jet VTOL Ryan XV-5 Vertifan (look how great it is flying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwvkjFIYWR8 ) was much better than F-35 has been and X-76 will be.

And giving pilotless future of combat air, a tail sitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail-sitter will work great in pilotless version not needing all that folding/rotating hardware. A pilotless would also not have to have at least double engines/etc for reliability (and the monstrosity of interconnect between those 2 engines like V-22 has and X-76 is bound to have).