Would like to address the battleship point. From my reading on the subject, and I've read quite a bit, prior to Pearl the Navy still very much had the old guard BB mentality. (For that matter, Japan was still partially in the same boat [sic] with the Yamato.)

But carriers were the only way for Japan to get in a successful strike at Pearl. And after Pearl, like it or not, pretty much the only thing we had left in the Pacific in the way of active surface combatents were the flattops.

The fact that they could do the job better became more apparent, true. But it's pretty obvious that if Japan hadn't destroyed our major captial ships they would have been considered to be our primary striking force, and we would have sent those targets out against Japan.

And they were targets.