Cost. The F-22 costs $200M+ per plane. The F-35 cost $94M for the small initial production runs, and that's expected to come down as production volumes go up and the program cost (which includes large fixed costs like software and tooling) gets amortized over the production run.

One F-22 vs one F-35 is a contest obviously in favor of the F-22. One F-22 vs. three F-35s becomes a lot more ambiguous, particularly when we are not at war and there's no guarantee that any of these planes will do anything more than force projection.

(The F-35 very much seems like a peacetime fighter to me, and that may be exactly what the U.S. needs right now. History has shown that basically all your assumptions about how the next war will unfold go out the window once the next war actually starts. Under those conditions, it may make more sense to try out a bunch of new technologies, keep the defense contractors alive and the aeronautical engineers employed, contain costs, and build enough numbers that you don't get completely steamrolled in the early days of a war. Then when war actually does break out, you rapidly adjust and build the planes that you actually need, when you have real data about what's winning on the battlefield.)

"History has shown that basically all your assumptions about how the next war will unfold go out the window once the next war actually starts."

Also, don't forget that nuclear weapons still exist. Nuclear powers shooting down squadrons of each others fighters to achieve "victory" does not seem likely.

Controversial opinion here, but I think nukes are going to be an evolutionary dead-end in the history of weaponry. Either they'll end up getting used, in which case "WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones", or more likely they won't end up getting used because everybody knows that's the outcome, and we'll have more conventional proxy wars where everyone just pretends nukes don't exist.

Other controversial opinion: I think that the assumption that the next major war will be between nation-states is a likely candidate for one that'll go out the window. In my view, the next major war will be like Syria but on a global scale, with many semi-organized subnational groups duking it out in exceptionally nasty urban & guerilla warfare.

I thought those were both mainstream opinions.

1. F22's are banned from being sold to anyone but the US.

2. F22's are only fighter jets. F35 for better and worse is designed to do just about everything.

The F-15Es do better in strike roles than planes that weren't supposed to be pure fighters.

The motto of the F-15 when it was initially designed was "not a pound for air to ground."

Sure, but Han shot first.

We sell the F-35 because if it ever came to it, our F-22's would dominate their F-35's they bought from us.

But to be fair, as the other comments have pointed out the F-35 is lower cost, a decent peace time machine and is has flexible configurations.

For the same reason people buy Corollas when Audis are available. Even with all the troubles the F-35 has had, the F-22s still have a substantially higher unit cost.

The F-22 also can't be sold as an export.

Only version available for export, about half the price.

It is supposed to be the cheaper stealth fighter.