I think it had to do with not being told the size of the formation. maybe if the operator had told him that things could have been different.Was that forgiveness for his junior rank as it were or forgiveness because as you stated a critical bit of information , the number of aircraft was not relayed to him. On a side note, would be have had the authority to scramble armed aircraft?
True, but at least it might have made the defences at Pearl Harbour seem under-resourced rather than incompetently led.It's been a while since I read up on the details of Pearl Harbor, but I'm not sure that the Hawaiian Air Force had a fully operational system for scrambling alert fighters even if Lt. Tyler had acted on the info. There was no system in place to get a scramble order out to all of the USAAF bases on the island.
They were still training, it was not an operational early warning system.