Would Britain have been better without the R class?

Would the Royal Navy have been better off using R-class tonnage for more cruisers?

Better battleships were preferable; faster, modernized R-class ships could still have served usefully as carrier escorts.

Better battleships are the preferred alternative to reallocating all R-class tonnage to cruisers. A few additional knots from construction, followed by interwar machinery improvements, could have made the ships more useful. Japanese modernization supplies a comparison for that proposal. Faster R-class ships could then have served as aircraft-carrier escorts. This remains a counterfactual improvement to the class, rather than a claim that the actual ships had the required speed.