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.
If the first wave flies into Pearl and doesn’t find the battle ships there, how much time do they have to go hunting for them? I wouldn’t think very much. I imagine they bomb what they can, and go (which might have ended up causing a bigger problem by taking out all of the fuel tanks....)
How many of the scattered destroyers were taken out? According to Wiki, the only three destroyers hit were in dry dock, so it seems that the minimal scattering sufficed.
Was maintaining air coverage at the time really that big a concern?