You will get no disagreement from me on the Essex class being the best of all the CV designs in WW2
However they were not treaty limited and certainly did benefit from the 4 year gap between the designs allowing for learnings from the Yorktown's and Wasp - and the shared early war time experiences of the British
Essex was laid down in April 1941 and while there is no doubt that they are an evolution of the Yorktown the extra years between the design provided them with a much greater amount of armour, improved machinary layout, better TDS and being far larger than both the Yorktown and the Illustrious class, better at operating aircraft and more of them
If you really want to compare carriers then compare the Illustrious class to the Yorktown's - USA's treaty limited carriers and not one that was freed from the shackles of the 2LNT limitations.
--Illustrious was ordered in 1937. It is fair to say that she was LNT treaty restricted as to design. Average air group ~36-44 aircraft. ~22,000 tonnes SDP
--Ark Royal was ordered in 1934. It is fair to say that she was treaty restricted. Average air group ~44-54 aircraft. ~25,000 tonnes SDP
What happened?
--Yorktown was ordered in 1933. Definitely WNT and she was so treaty restricted. Average air group ~64-76 aircraft ~25,000 tonnes SDP
--Wasp was ordered in 1935. WNT hobbled. Average air group ~ 64-76 aircraft ~ 18,000-20,000 SDP (sources vary)
So Illustrious is more akin to WASP.
Start 15.00 in and you will see what I think about British claims about armored flight deck carriers.
And here...
What is the difference between an Essex and an Illustrious?
About the Lexingtons. (The Two White Elephants).
While the Ranger was being constructed, the two white elephants entered service and demonstrated that size mattered. In this case, it was soon obvious that the total number of aircraft in a fleet was not as important as the number on board each carrier, because the latter comprised U.S. carrier aviation’s tactical unit, the air wing. (Later, well into World War II, the U.S. Navy began conducting multicarrier air-group operations.) Size also bought speed and survivability. The Lexington and Saratoga, but not the Ranger, fought in the Pacific. The bigger carriers were not turkeys; they were ugly ducklings that became swans.
Read the whole article at the USNI citation to get the fill story.
And now...
Many of the ships the U.S. Navy built during World War II reinforce the bigger-is-better lesson. Designers always want to create the tightest possible package that fulfills specific requirements. For various reasons, by 1941 the U.S. Navy was demanding enough to get larger packages than those of some other navies (German heavy cruisers and destroyers were larger, apparently without getting as much for the tonnage). During the war, British captains periodically wrote that they wished they could have similarly large ships, and by the time Japan surrendered the British were designing and building U.S.-size destroyers. However, the usual response by the British design authority was that the American ships were large simply because their designers were incompetent; they produced loose, expensive ships.
Now that was clearly untrue. The Americans designed tight ships for the criteria they wanted. If one looks at the Atlantas and the Didos, both ship classes which I like *See same article), one sees that the American AAA cruiser was designed to be like a large destroyer. The RN wanted a dual use cruiser that had some trade protection value, hence the different choices in main armament, and the different solutions to mid and close-in AAA defense when that became an urgent necessity in the Med and in the early Pacific War. One has to see WHY a navy did what it did, and adjudge the effectiveness. Juneau was just an Atlanta repeat with better arrangements. Dido had to be replaced by a larger platform with different guns.
Another myth...
The only real criticism was that having been designed mainly for the calm Pacific, the ships were ill-adapted to patrolling rough northern waters, which Cold War service usually entailed. The British had much better hull forms for seakeeping. However, many of their well-designed warships could not accommodate new technologies, resulting in the size of the Royal Navy contracting faster than necessary.
The RN ships might have radioed "what typhoon?" as the joke goes, but I think Friedman was being generous. Small ships with wrong length to beam ratios (And you British ships know who you are, since I crossed in one.) ride ROUGH in a Pacific typhoon or an Atlantic hurricane. The western Pacific as the Japanese knew and the British discovered is not a gentle place. The Arctic seas were rough, but warships that could ride through a Pacific cyclone could FIGHT in arctic seas, especially aircraft carriers.
What conclusions can be drawn about ship design? One lesson, at least in surface ships, is that reaching for spectacular performance, speed for example, is often counterproductive: The enemy’s weapons generally outrun ships. The sacrifices made for a few knots may be difficult to identify, but they are real and later on become unacceptable. Also size pays, even if at the outset it may seem wasteful. The larger the ship, the better the opportunity to modernize her to keep up with a changing world.
A navy needs numbers. Usually that is translated to mean that ships should be made as inexpensively as possible. However, there is another way to look at numbers.
The number of ships the U.S. Navy can maintain is, roughly, the number the Navy can build each year multiplied by the number of years a ship remains viable—and viability is a matter both of how well the ship survives the rigors of the sea and of how well she survives the rigors of a rapidly changing world. The bigger the ship, the better she will survive the sea. If bigger also means better at adapting to the changing world, the answer to numbers is probably to build fewer ships each year but to make them big.
Quod erat demonstratum. Or to put it another way... Which ships were scrapped as useless and which served postwar?
The Essexes and their GATO/BALAO submarine contemporaries, have examples which are now museum ships with the pedigrees of the Constitution. Even the North Carolinas and the Iowas are so honored.
Where is the Illustrious and T class sub?
Razor blades.