What really went wrong with the Queen Elizabeth class?

Were engines, excessive weight, or hull form the real problem with the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships?

None was a single fatal flaw; each reflected a deliberate compromise among fleet doctrine, design politics, budgets, industrial limits, and the risks of escalating the naval technology race.

No single defective feature explains the Queen Elizabeth class. Engines, displacement, and hull form were symptoms of a design process shaped by competing naval leaders, budget choices, industrial capacity, technological risk, and the class's intended fleet role. The alleged faults only make sense when tested against the German threat, the Grand Fleet's tactical needs, and the risk of provoking the next round of capital-ship competition. The conclusion is that little went wrong in a simple engineering sense: the Royal Navy accepted a powerful compromise instead of building the most extreme fast battleship British industry could produce.