Judging the Fuso class by the war it was built to fight

Were the Fuso-class battleships poor designs because they achieved little in the Second World War?

No; they were designed for mobile warfare and an eight-year life, not the radically different war they faced twenty years later.

Japanese geography encouraged a stronger emphasis on mobility than the North Sea battle-line assumptions shaping British and German ships. The class would have been useful in a First World War fleet but became harbour-bound when the war it actually fought exceeded its design context. Japan's Eight-Eight programme expected eight battleships and eight battlecruisers no more than eight years old. A twenty-year-old ship's final combat record is therefore a poor sole measure of its original quality.