What is the reason for the poor low-speed characteristics of sweptback wings?
Disadvantages of wing sweep


Lift curve slope is reduced by the cosine of the quarter chord sweep angle. This means more angle of attack for takeoff, which requires a longer take-off run and a longer landing gear to avoid a tail strike on rotation.
If you rotate the airplane, the tips of backward swept wings come down when the aircraft rotates for take-off. This also might drive the requirement for a longer landing gear.
Bending moments in the wing will become torsion moments when you change the sweep angle. And you will need to change it at least in the wing root where the wing connects to the fuselage. This translates into a heavier structure.
If your sweep angle and aspect ratio both are large enough, the wing will show nasty stall characteristics. The boundary layer is swept towards the tips and causes earlier separation when the wing stalls, and the airplane will pitch up or roll uncontrollably. Wing fences help, but cannot completely remedy this.
Wing sweep causes a yaw-induced rolling moment, so less dihedral is needed. On high wing airplanes this requires to use anhedral. Unfortunately, this rolling moment varies with lift coefficient, so your yaw-induced rolling moment on a swept aircraft is lower than ideal at high speed and higher at low speed.
For flying wings, sweep will let the aircraft center pitch up and down when the wing flexes. This creates a powerful interaction between the fast period mode (which is only moderately damped in flying wings) with the wing bending mode, resulting in flutter.


In short, when having a choice, the clever airplane designer avoids sweep whenever he/she can. But sweeping a wing back is still better than forward sweep.

Low Speed Characteristics

An airfoil initially accelerates the air which flows over its top surface and decelerates it again over its rear part. On swept wings, this acceleration-deceleration only affects the orthogonal speed component, so the speed component in span direction remains unaffected. This is the reason for the higher Mach capability of swept wings, but also causes the air to flow first inwards and then outwards while transversing the wing's upper surface.

On top, friction decelerates the air flowing around a body, such that a layer of decelerated air surrounds each surface of an airplane. The thickness of this boundary layer increases with flow length, and on a swept wing this friction will initially mostly affect the orthogonal flow component. At around mid chord you will find air which has been decelerated mostly in its orthogonal speed component (since this component was so high over the forward part) and now will be subject to more deceleration of the orthogonal component, so that only the spanwise component will be left over the rear part of the boundary layer. Now this boundary layer will only flow off in span direction, such that a massive increase of slow, low-energy air will be collecting towards the tips.

A thick boundary layer will cause early flow separation, so when the angle of attack is increased, the flow at the tips of a backward swept wing will separate first. This will cause lift loss, and since the tips are also the rearward part of the wing, will shift the aerodynamic center forward. This in turn will make the aircraft pitch up, which aggravates the stall condition. If the separation happens asymmetrically, the aircraft will roll in addition to pitching up. In case of the F-100, the tail surfaces were too small to stop the pitch-up, so once the aircraft crossed into the stall region, it would uncontrollably pitch up more and stall completely.

Modern swept-back aircraft have an angle-of-attack limiter which will prevent the aircraft from flying into the stall region. Also, wing fences help to keep the spanwise flow in check, and vortex generators help to energize the flow such that the early flow separation at the wing tips is sufficiently delayed to avoid the uncontrollable pitch-up. The F-100 lacked all those remedies.



Wing fences on a MiG-17 (picture source)



Vortex generators on a Boeing 737 wing (picture source)