Lets face it they should have simply kept more light fleets for the same price and never built them.....
I'll reiterate, if you want a good account of the light fleets in combat, read
John Landsdown's With the Carriers in Korea (an editor had to add the "South East Asia" to the title; Mr Landsdown knows quite well where Korea is!)
It's an eye opener, good insight into RN carrier operations postwar.
The light fleets, with their larger elevators compared to the wartime armored deck carriers, should have been a place-holder for the RN until they could have gotten the financials together and built some CVAs in the 50s.
As for the cruisers, the wartime built hulls were just too d@mn small. They should have never been utilized, the three
Swiftsures commissioned should have been the last of them. What they should have built to bridge the gap between conventional light cruisers and guided missiles was one of the
Minotaur designs
They would have provided the fleet with real AA firepower and large ships suitable for showing the flag on foreign stations and task force flagships. Let the light fleets and the CVAs focus on aviation; put the admirals on another ship so they can focus on fleet command.
But RN finances and decision making postwar is mostly a comedy of errors, poor decisions and good money thrown after bad, not something a financially strapped nation needed at the time.
My additional thoughts,