Why 9.2-inch cruisers would rewrite the path to Hawkins

If Britain had built 9.2-inch-gun armoured cruisers, what reason would remain not to give the later Hawkins class the same weapon?

The premise changes the entire cruiser-development lineage, so Hawkins would emerge several design generations later and might not resemble the historical class at all.

An early British 9.2-inch cruiser programme would create a different line of successor designs before the Hawkins class appeared. Several generations of cruiser development separate the proposals. The later ships would therefore emerge from changed assumptions and earlier design choices. The precise outcome remains uncertain, so Hawkins cannot simply be assigned a different gun while the rest of its historical development is held fixed.