Indefatigable and the danger of speed at any price

How could the Indefatigable class end up worse than its predecessor?

Its designers prioritised speed so heavily that the sacrifices elsewhere left a less successful overall ship.

Indefatigable belongs among designs made worse by allowing one quality to dominate the entire brief. The designers pursued speed and sacrificed other characteristics to obtain it. That trade did not produce a sufficiently successful overall ship, so the nominal advance became a practical regression. It warns against evaluating a warship by one headline performance figure.