I would certainly agree a beautiful aircraft with many innovations but:
According to the 2012 book Rearming for the Cold War, 1945-1960 by retired USAF Col. Elliott V. Converse III.
As a supersonic jet bomber the B-58 was capable of flying significantly faster, Mach 2.0, than the B-52 Stratofortress and the Stratojet. With a maximum altitude of 63,400 feet, it flew much higher than both of those bombers but the Hustler was also small, for a bomber, with its 95.10-foot length and a 56.9-foot-wingspan. A B-52 is 64 feet longer and has 128 more feet of wing. The Air Force's top priority was speed and the Hustler's four J79-GE-5A turbojet engines were capable of individually producing 10,400 pounds of dry thrust. The delta wing shape also helped increase speed, but the resulting drag pushed the engineers to redesign the fuselage in a curved "coke-bottle" shape leaving no room for a bomb bay thus a large bomb-and-fuel pod sat underneath the fuselage. To reduce heat, Convair designed the B-58's skin out of honeycombed fiberglass sandwiched between aluminum and steel plates, glued together instead of riveted, a process that would later be used in future jet aircraft.
The Air Force aimed to have the bombers armed with a single nine-megaton B53 nuclear bomb or four B43 or B61 nuclear bombs on four wing pylons. Its goal was to dash into the Soviet Union and China at speeds and altitudes that interceptors and surface-to-air missiles would have difficulty reaching. At the time,1964, the CIA determined that the only Chinese aircraft possibly capable of intercepting it was the MiG-21 Fishbed and "even then" the chances of a successful hit would be "marginal.".
Unfortunately the Hustler's small size created one of its biggest shortcomings for a jet designed to penetrate Soviet airspace, i.e. an unrefueled combat radius of only 1,740 miles. This would require the Air Force to base its Hustlers in Europe or devote substantial numbers of tankers for aerial refueling. The short range was a serious concern in the Air Force and Lt. Gen. Curtis LeMay of Strategic Air Command disliked the bomber and wanted the planes kept away from SAC. To make matters worse, the bomber was mechanically complicated, expensive to operate (three times as much as the B-52) and it was proving difficult to develop. For example, to redesign the fuselage into the "coke bottle" forced delays in the program and an increase in costs. As the problems and costs mounted the Air Force would end up buying only 116 Hustlers, a third of what had originally been proposed.
While speed had been the number one concern it also created problems. Because the bomber traveled so fast, the Air Force needed a new navigation and bombing system — the Sperry AN/ASQ-42 — which proved most troublesome of all to develop. Then the J79 engine ran into problems, as did the braking system and ejection seats, the latter of which Convair ultimately swapped out for ejectable pods.
Ultimately two factors doomed the Hustler. The first was the development of better Soviet surface-to-air missiles in the 1950s culminating in the May 1960 shoot down of a high-flying U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers. The weapon, an S-75 Dvina — known by NATO as the SA-2 Guideline — could reach thousands of feet higher than the B-58's maximum operating altitude.
While the B-58 cold fly lower, flying low also means flying slow and that defeated the very purpose of the Hustler's design. The low and slow B-58 also handled very poorly which caused several crashes.
The second problem was inherent to the U.S. Air Force's demand that the B-58's development occur concurrently, i.e., a system should be designed from the outset as an integrated whole and, based upon this plan, work on all of the elements making up the system, including its subsystems and aspects of its employment such as supporting facilities and equipment and training programs, should all take place at the same time.
This demand for concurrency meant that when problems arose, they created a series of cascading problems for the entire project. The system then had to either be redesigned or wait for the problems to be solved. As a result, development slowed, some production preparations had to be scrapped, costs rose, and deployment was delayed.
If this sounds familiar, it should, recall the repeated delays to the F-35. While the Air Force promised that concurrency would reduce costs for the stealth fighter, it hasn't. In fact, quite the opposite.