Having to hunt for scattered moving ships would have chewed up fuel and reduced accuracy significantly. Given the loss of life from theArizona alone, I think scattering would have been better.
Additionally, realizing that the battleship commanders and fleet commander were black-shoe Navy .. line-of-battle believers .. they would have kept the fleet tightly together, figuring that they were going to have a reprise of Jutland.
Finally, these old battleships were not very light on their feet, plodding old behemoths that would have had less of a chance than Prince of Wales or Repulse had off Singapore. With the number of planes that had been sent out by the Japanese, the slow speed of the battleships, and the existing line-of-battle beliefs of the commanders at Pearl Harbor, it would have been a slaughter.