Considering the success of the Vought F4U Corsair, a standout in both World War II and Korea that continued to serve on U.S. Navy carrier decks and in Marine Corps fighter and attack squadrons until the mid-1950s, and the very successful Vought F-8 (old F8U) Crusader of Vietnam war fame, it's easy to overlook the fact that Vought had a number of duds in between those two great airplanes.
-- The F5U, which was designed during WW2, never flew, although a low-powered "flying disc" prototype flew during the war. The F5U promised great performance but had intractable prop problems and the general reductions after the war doomed it.
-- The F6U was the first Navy fighter with an afterburner, but was otherwise unremarkable and never entered squadron service.
-- The F7U Cutlass did enter squadron service but earned the derogatory nickname "Gutless Cutlass" for poor flying qualities. Almost 300 were built, but in hindsight it is difficult to understand why. The F7U-3M version was an early user of the Sparrow radar-guided air-to-air-missile. The F7U was also the first production Navy fighter to have afterburning engines. The Marines wisely avoided the F7U, and Navy examples were retired after very few years of service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought_F7U_Cutlass
The one consistent theme of Vought fighters was that they were innovative, so there's that.