Why the Dauntless was the wrong technical baseline

The Dauntless's victories at Coral Sea and Midway gave it a combat prestige that any successor would struggle to match. The SB2C's design lineage, however, ran through the earlier Curtiss SBC Helldiver rather than beginning as a clean-sheet answer to the SBD. The SBC had helped establish US Navy dive-bomber doctrine, while the Dauntless's fame magnified expectations among pilots who had fought with it. Service replacement and technical lineage therefore provide different baselines for judging the SB2C.