A thought crosses my mind that perhaps the most critical hole in the RN at the moment is air defence, due to the low number of Darings procured. If (and its a big if) UKs pollies stop staring at their belly buttons long enough to realise that the global situation is far less benign than when Type 42 numbers were halved and they have insufficient high end air defence and ASW assets to meet their stated strategic requirements, a multirole Type 26 would have to be a pretty good option to rebuild numbers?
The RAN version will likely be better air warfare ships than the Hobarts, while retaining the same ASW capability as the RN ships, it would be quite easy for the UK to design their own enhanced capability air warfare version, with no degradation in ASW, maybe even just integrate the Australian radars into their preferred combat system and build a batch of three to six of them, following the last of the ASW hulls. Perhaps even continuing to build batches to replace the Daring as they hit mid life and get flogged off to Chile.
The next cheeky suggestion of mine, is build additional Type 31s to replace the OPVs as they hit midlife and get sold off overseas. This way the UK could end up with two concurrent, continuous build projects, equipping the RN with continually evolving and improving Type 26s and Type 31s. Small increase in numbers, massive increase in capability, but with commonality reducing the training and logistics impact, and a sustainable ship building industry, not exporting huge number of new build ships, but feeding new ships to the RN who cascades the old to allies.
Perhaps the multirole Type 26 could be reclassified as the Type 83? A true replacement for the Bristol class carrier escort, a ship sometimes referred to as a cruiser (the Counties were referred to as DLGs a type that were reclassified as cruisers in USN service).