No German Dive Bombers!

What if the dive bomber idea was rejected rather than embraced by the Luftwaffe? A catalyst perhaps is that Wever survives and Udet never rises to the technical branch, where he influenced several projects including the Ju87 Stuka. That aircraft became obsolete quickly once the Germans lost air superiority and indeed was probably so at the start of the war. So what happens to the Luftwaffe? The Ju88 'fast bomber' comes out earlier and is faster than historically as a level bomber, the Do19 probably comes out too, the Fw190 comes out earlier, and the Bf110 perhaps becomes at fighter-bomber earlier, taking on the role of the Stuka with greater success IMHO.
Any ideas?

The biggest appeal of dive-bombing was that, instead of dropping a lot of bombs to get a few hits, you dropped one that hit. Given Germany's limited resources at the time this was _very_ attractive as well as a good substitute for heavy artillery which was still being built.

OTOH strategic bombing was still an accepted concept. Wever will fight hard for it, even at the expense of the dive bomber.

In the end Goring will do whatever the Fuhrer wants. And remember, he once said "the Fuhrer doesn't ask what _kinds_ of bombers I have, but how _many_."

Consider that the Germans created the book on Combined Operations as a key requirement of successful "blitkrieg" warfare and that the Stuka was the aircraft that most embodied this concept. To arrive at the tactical failure at the BoB, they went through a large number of stunning successes which quite possibly would have been failures. All that was done with a fairly small industrial input. Under a 1000 Ju-87B's were produced. By comparison, the British manufactured 1000 Boulton-Paul Defiants, many after it's worthlessness was verified. As much effort was put into manufacturing the Messerschmitt Me 210, the Stuka's replacement. You don't gain much industrial capacity by eliminating something that achieved so much success.

The Royal Navy had considerable losses to the Stuka, in the Med and elsewhere. The Balkans and the first chapter of the Russian campaign relied on those pesky dive bombers to supply something that no other aircraft could do. And then, there's Rudel.

The He 177 is another story. But it suffered as much from the engine configuration and just plain bad luck as it did from misguided dive bombing aspirations.