Why the armoured cruiser did not become the heavy cruiser

The late Minotaur class was an expensive design completed after the Royal Navy had already begun building battlecruisers. A roughly 15,000-ton turbine-powered cruiser with a unified 9.2-inch battery would have made a coherent intermediate type for overseas stations and for defeating enemy armoured cruisers. Such a ship would not replace a battlecruiser, but it would preserve a heavy cruiser branch without pretending to be a battleship. Instead, the armoured-cruiser line stopped and Hawkins grew upward from the light-cruiser tradition. In this interpretation, that break helped shape the later 10,000-ton treaty heavy cruiser and the compromises imposed by its limited displacement.