They probably de-emphasized gunnery because of the Lomng Lance.
Actually Jap naval fire control was mostly optical with some radar ranging. It wasn’t that bad, in fact their night vision stuff was state of the art for the time period. Engaging the Jap Navy at night was death sentence for the first 3 years of the war.
For a cruiser or destroyer, perhaps. But battleships exist to carry and fire their guns. I would imagine that gunnery expertise would be a top priority on a battleship. As I understand it one of the issues at Samar was that the Japanese overestimated the size and speed of their targets which would lead to errors in calculating their shots.