First rates brought concentrated power to the tasks for which the largest ship was genuinely needed. A single third rate would usually be overmatched, although several acting together could make the contest dangerous and sometimes win. The mistake was to turn the prestige ship from a fleet core into the model for the entire force. Doing so exchanged deployable mass and varied roles for a smaller number of peak-capability hulls. The argument is about fleet balance, not a claim that smaller ships were always better.
Notable Point · 27:57-28:54
First rates belonged at the fleet's core
A first rate was valuable as the hard core of a fleet, but building the whole force around such ships sacrificed the numbers and role coverage that made sea power usable.