Verry possible.I believe that you will find that Marcus was busting our friend Bard's chops with his comment.
Looking again at the rest of what I said, I should perhaps retract most of it.
My recollection of the timing is, Fletcher & Brown would have arrived around the same time Soryu & Hiryu did, absent change to OTL scheduling. That being so, IMO IJN experience would outweigh the deficiencies. It does mean Soryu & Hiryu (like Shokaku & Zuikaku after Coral Sea) would be out of action awhile, which IMO butterflies the Colombo raid (which I also overlooked beforeThe engagement between two IJN and two USN carriers would have been much more competitive than you think. Even accepting the lower quality (and numbers) of the U.S. fighters compared to later in the war the Japanese carriers demonstrated themselves to be less than robust and saddled with some significant design flaws related to handling battle damage.
There is also the not insignificant fact that the IJN carriers didn't arrive until 12/22. A relief force could have arrived as soon as the 17th, even allowing for the understandable confusion after the Pearl Harbor attacks. That would have permitted the defenders plenty of time to prepare for the second attack.
If you're right & the MDB arrives with 4-5 days in hand (& we presume Fletcher offloads his F2As), Inouye has a real fight on his hands. And we are back to the Midway analog, only in this case, Rochefort's guys aren't as well respected, tho I think Finnegan & Co at Cast could still read JN-25 (&, more important, the callsign cypher) well enough to see it coming.
The real trouble is overcoming Pye's (very understandable) reluctance to hazard the only striking power he had left. Can we justify him proposing reinforcement in the name of national morale? Or can we have FDR pushing for something, & Pye saying, "I've got just the thing."?