I can't disagree with your last post (concerning the Luftwaffe and Japanese Air force dispositions due to bombing campaigns), but on the whole, there are very few situations late in the war where that airpower which had been redeployed could have had any dramtic impact on the war.
One of them was Normandy, certainly, others include was Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Had there ven been anything approaching German or Japanese parity in air forces, all of them would have been a disaster.
But, when faced with the fact that the Germans not only continued to produce FW-190's, Me-109's and the even better Me-262, they also continued to produce the V-1 and V-2, the Tiger Tank, the 88 mm gun, the Panzerfaust, improved U-Boats (all of which took quite a few lives on their own), and the steel, synthetic fuels, food supplies and ammunition for all of this right up until the last days of the war, has to tell you something: Strategic bombing campaigns designed to prevent the production of these weapons and commodities did no such thing, or at best, did so to only a limited extent.
And that campaign (against Germany) cost the USAAF 60,000 men and the British another 50,000 or so. When you weigh what was achieved by what it cost (in men, material and moral terms) it was hardly worth it. The very fact that there have been an entire host of reasons justifying it (we wore down the Luftwaffe, we devestated German production and transportation (not!), "they did it first", etc, etc), have all come after the fact, and after the realization that what was promised was not what was delivered with regards to long-range strategic bombing.
What eventually did Germany in was a war on multiple fronts, waged with unreliable allies, fought for obscure and often contradictory political aims, against similarly implaccable enemies with a greater freedom of movement and larger resources from which to draw from.
With regards to your comment on Midway, once again, one of the tertiary aims of Operation MI was to force a surrender on terms favorable to Japan.
The Japanese never swayed from the belief that the West would negotiate. The initial campaigns of the war (Phillipines, Borneo, Malaya and Singapore, Hong Kong, et. al) were supposed ot demonstate Japanese superiority, and the allies were supposed to negotioate.
Didn't happen.
The destruction or at least the chasing of the Royal Navy from the Indian Ocean was supposed to give the allies pause to think about negotiation because there was now no way to secure the lines of communication to India with no British fleet in the region.
Didn't happen.
The capture of Port Morseby and Solomon Islands (precursors to Midway) were intended to cut off Australia from resupply from the United States. With Australia isolated, and untenable as a base of operations against Japan, the allies should negotiate.
Didn't happen.
At Midway, once the remnants of the US Pacific fleet were lured out and destroyed, Midway (the sentry of Hawaii) taken, and the Americans chased back to the West Coast, the allies should negotiate.
Didn't happen, because we won.
Later in the war, when Japan is clearly on the defensive, the strategy changes: now the Japanese, instead of making the allies see the logic of negotiating with a militarily superior Japan, will now be made to bleed so badly that they should, logically, negotiate with Japan.
Didn't happen.
The Japanese always included the possibility of a negotiated surrender in every stage of their planning and execution. The fact that even while victorious they were seeking a negotiated peace tells you something about the Japanese ability (as they saw it) to win a prolonged war.
The Japanese went to war with a very bad handicap: they had spent 70 years becoming a Western nation in terms of military force, industrial capacity, the collection of colonies and extra-territorial rights, so on and so forth, but they never really UNDERSTOOD the mentality that made those things possible in the first place. Japan APPEARED modern and Western but could not THINK in modern, Western terms.
This inability to see the reality of Western history through anything but Japanese-tinted lenses, was to ultimately lead Japan to defeat.
Western nations at war never surrender unless and until the situation is completely, obviously hopeless (see WWII Britain and Germany, for examples from both ends of the spectrum). Instead, they fight wars of annhiliation, willing to sacrifice everything, many times, in an effort to preserve their liberties and way of life. Negotiation was never a realistic hope after Pearl Harbor and the onslaught of the initial Pacific campaigns. Had the Japanese recognized this (and many did, including Admiral Yammamoto who planned the Pearl Harbor attack) they might never have gone to war with the West in the first place.
This caused the Japanese to continue to plan and execute military and political strategy with an Oriental flavor (surprise, shock, demonstration of cultural/racial superiority), but with what they considered somewhat equal means (modern navies, air forces and national, citizen armies). It turned out that the means were not similar: ours were the result of our peculiar way of thinking and an odd mix of customs that permeated the western war effort theirs a result of trying to forcibly blend the appearance of modernity with an ancient, inflexible culture unable to come to grips with the fact that they were, in practice, borrowing the entire apparatus of a race and culture they claimed was inferior to their own. This system could not survive the inherant contradictions in a time of war with the West.