why oh why did the Royal Navy request\demand\stipulate STOVL carriers as being the carrier of choice?
Was there a bit of
The real problem is that the Equipment Capability customer in town started with the assumption that STOVL was the way forward and that view never really changed.
that was unclear? The "Royal Navy" does not / did not get to specify anything. Read the middle paragraphs again mate, the answer lies there.
There's also an entire sub-theme on the perception of risk for EMALS or steam cats and their maturity and manning costs over the last fifteen years, but that is only a sub-plot. The meat of it pertains to organisational rivalry and budgets.
As for bringback - the landing technique referred to is apparently only for specific environmental circumstances and payloads, not the method of landing every time.
As to why not STOBAR - check out the Liaoning in the picture. Safe parking area defined by the hatched red line. That's a ship broadly the same size as QEC and yet I think you'd struggle to range more than 8 cabs in the safe parking area - something like 75%+ of the deck is required for launching and recovering aircraft. If you want to park more you have to move them between recovery and the next launch, which last time I looked requires chockheads, lots of chockheads, which we haven't got. QEC will comfortably park the best part of 20 cabs on the roof, without affecting launch or recovery and without having to re-spot.
The Russ are not putting cats on Kuznetsov. The Chinese appear to be going for CTOL in their next carriers.