NAB,
Excellent post.
What yours and also Tuc's post illustrate was the lack of detailed, instinctive, understanding within the MoD of the way aircraft carrier design drivers relate to each other. In particular, there was little appreciation of how crowded aircraft carriers are, and how much they really cost to alter after they are built.
The phrase going round in about 97 to 2001 was: 'air is free and steel is cheap' - inferring that bigger ships would have lots of free space and any conversions would be 'easy'. The CVF PT were told at the time that this was hoop, but as Tuc so rightly points out, there was plenty of hubris flying around at that stage.
Easy to criticise, as it was years since the UK had last designed a ship of this size - but lack of knowledge was not shown as a risk on the registers I saw. Neither were defective cost models. And there were ways of mitigating these risks.
This then led to the SDSR 2010 nonsense of deciding to go for cats and traps without getting the costings in place.
Now we are where we are, best regards as ever, to those getting the ships and the aircraft ready.
Engines