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Royal Navy carriers were small which helped reduce aircraft capacity

Considering the RAF ensured that the RN had trouble filling them with to their designed capacity anyway, the extra protection was a good choice. As noted, they were better than any other European CV.

the Nelrods were a complete waste of time- smaller & miles slower than Hood! their 16" guns werent great either but blame that on the gun researchers & designers!

Compare them to their contemporaries, the US Colorados and the Nagatos and they show up very well. As fast, well armed and protected as the US ships, and better armed and protected than the Japanese ones.

the KGV class

Were well armoured and armed. They compare very well against the larger Bismarcks or the Romas. Name an engagement where 15 inch guns or a couple of thousand more toms displacement would have made a difference.

the Royal Navy missed their chance to upgrade the Hood's deck armour & they therefore sent an entire crew to their deaths,

What chance? The RN still had more new or modernized capital ships at that time than the IJN. I doubt that a modernized Kongo would have done better.

the PoW could also have handed up sunk aswell if the bismarck had persued.

Or Bismarck could have ended up sunk instead.

what then would the Admiralty have done?

Just what they did historically to sink Bismarck. Having one less modern battleship might have caused some inconvenience later. They might not have sent Force Z at all or sent KGV in PoW's place.

the Royal Navy should have done more to equip convoys with escorts earlier on. also far too many slow ships were simply left on their own to travel.

Specifically how and why given what was known in 1938? Do note that the forces available worked quite well unbtil the Germans were able to use bases in France. That was hardly predicable until mid 1940.

the British govt did seem to be overzealous in its following of treatis

Not much more than the US. Democracies tend to find cheating harder than despotic regimes.

but couldnt that admiralty have made 'mistakes'

No. You can't turn a fourteen inch gun into a 14.5 or 15 inch gun by accident and everyone knows it. Do that, and as soon as it is discovered, and it will be almost immediately, everyone else goes to 16 inch. As noted, if the RN wanted a larger gun, they would have had to wait. As it was, the 14 inch gun as effective against its intended targets as the German, Japanese, and Italian 15 and 16 inch guns were against theirs, and as practically ineffective against the new Japanese BB's, the Yamatos, as the US 16 inch - not that they ever had to engage them.

35,000 ton BBs being 45,000 tons

They might have got away with 38,000 before being noticed. Note that even the Bismarck's were only 41,700 tons but they were laid down after the KGV. Had the British cheated, then the Germans and Italians were have cheated even worse than they did. Do note that the comparable USN ships, the North Carolinas, were only about a thousand tons more than the KGV.

yes something had to be sent to the far east but a single modern battleship & an old battlecruiser

Then what should they have sent given the resources available and the fact they were actively fighting the Germans and Italians?

yes they had successes but that was partly due to the incompetence & lack of air defence of other nations.

In other words, the RN was a better navy than perhaps one or two in the world and better than all its European opponents and allies. It sounds, then, that they were, in fact, a very good navy indeed even if not perfect.

heavy cruisers would have been better against german or IJN heavy cruisers

Show examples where replacing Town or Colony class cruisers with heavies would have made a difference.

but maybe if the Royal Navy had more torpedo armed vessels in the vicinity

In the vicinity of what?