hi Kurfurst
There are any number of ways the data you presented might be misrepresented or misinterpreted. I dont think there is any serious disagreement that in the prewar build up to war, the british lagged in aircraft production. But it was not just the Spitfire production lines that lagged, in all categories the British seemed to lag behind the German expansion program. But there are good reasons to explain that. In that prewar period the Germans tended to concentrate on the hardware production, whereas, under the the Plan "L" expansion program the british concentrated on the support echelons...getting the rolled aluminium sheet industry organized, doing the prepratory work to set up the "shadow factory" systems, that kind of issue. That explains why, in the fiscal year 1938-9, the British on a budget nearly 1/3 that spent in 1939-40, only managed to put out 1/6 the numbers of aircraft in the earlier year.
Which raises another point. You mentioned that it takes 6000 hours to build a 109, whereas it took nearly three times that time to build a spitfire. Might be true, but are we comparing apples to apples here. In what time frame are we talking about this massive time diference. Are we comparing prewar spitfire construction times with say 1944 109 construction times. You might be right as I do know that factory space allocated to spitfire production was roughly three times that for the 109 production. However it seems unlikely in my opinion. The Germans with a budget roughly 1/3 larger than the RAF, and a workforce in germany about double that employed by the british in the production system, only produced slightly more than 1/2 as many fighters in 1940 and about 2/3 as many aircraft overall. Either the germans were super efficient in producing 109s as you say, and therfore absolutely hopeless in efficiency for all other types, or the cost per unit in 1940, including 109s went up (or at least was not reduced as it was for the RAF). I think the latter scenario is the more likley. Whereas prewar the british had invested heavily in preparing the infrastructure to facilitate production once the war broke out, the germans did not. The Germans concentrated on getting the finished product out the door from the very beginning. this gave them impressive short term benefits but in the long run meant their aero industry could not, in the early war period expand as easily or rapidly as the British could. This means, inevitably the unit costs for the british dropped markedly, whereas those for the germans were not so spectacular. After 1942, with Speer in charge of production the germans did turn this around, and demonstrated that they could churn out aircraft efficiently (which means their unit costs had to go down.
So this is what I suspect. I suspect you are quoting production times (and hence costs) for the later war period, which would be entirely plausible. You are also probably quoting prewar production costs for the Allied types, when the unit costs were being skwed by the behind the scenes secondary preprations.
To give you some idea of perspective, in 1942 when it first was produced, it took on average 57000 man hours to build a lancaster bomber. By 1943, with the production lines well organized and the glitches ironed ou, this figure had dropped to just over 21000 hours. Daves example for Ju88s is another good example, he says in 1939, the man hours spent for the then prototype ju88 was about 100000 hours, but by 1941 this had reduced to 15000 hours. I believe his figures