“What I found interesting when I toured the Texas a few years ago was that she had triple expansion steam reciprocating engines rather than steam turbines even thought the Dreadnought had steam turbines in 1906. This explains why the Texas was decommissioned immediately after WWII ended.”
Ah . . . no. *All* surviving US Navy first- and second-generation battleships were decommissioned immediately after World War II regardless of whether they had recipricating engines or turbines. Wyoming and Arkansas both had turbines and were deleted from the Navy list earlier than Texas. (In fact Wyoming had been converted to a gunnery training ship prior to WWII.) The Florida class — older than Texas, but also powered by steam turbines — had been discarded prior to WWII. Utah was being used as a target ship at the start of WWII, and was sunk by the Japanese who probably though it was an aircraft carrier. (Its decks were covered by timbers).
The surviving Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico class battleships (with the exception of Mississippi — which was used as gunnery test ship, replacing Wyoming) were all scrapped or expended as atom bomb test targets in the same year that Texas was stricken from the Navy. All of these had turbines and were newer than Texas. The rest of the battleships built in the late teens and 1920s had all been decommissioned by 1947 (although most were not scrapped for another decade).
There was no need for these ships regardless of their propulsion system. Something similar happened after WWI when virtually all of the pre-dreadnought battleships the USN had were scrapped in the decade after the end of WWI. Fortunately Texas had more interest in the ship named after it than did states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. (Those would have been cool ships to preserve.)
While the predreadnoughts were definitely obsolescent, they were scrapped under the terms of the first post WWI naval treaty.
After WWII, only the USS Missouri was retained in active service, mostly because she was Trumans favorite ship but also because the RN an FN were keeping their last battleships in service for ceremonial and sentimental reasons (HMS Vanguard was heavily modified to operate as a royal yacht).
In fact, when the Missouri was decommissioned after Korea and relegated to the relative backwater of Puget Sound, Truman took it as a personal affront by Eisenhower himself.