If Italy solved its naval ammunition problems before entering the war

What if Italy entered the Second World War with reliable naval shells and a large ammunition stockpile?

Britain would face much greater difficulty if Italy's wider gunnery problems were corrected, but reliable shells alone would not solve every cause of inconsistent shooting.

Italian gunnery could be accurate on one occasion and badly off target on another. Shell quality was one part of that inconsistency, with several other causes left unspecified here. Correcting the whole problem would make Britain's naval war substantially harder. In this counterfactual, Churchill's decision to pause carrier and capital-ship construction would attract even stronger criticism.