CVL-22 wasn't pretty, but with no island at all, Zuiho looks ugly, like there's something missing. The Independence class seems to have been a bit better, functionally, conversion, though the IJN being stretched so thin, after Midway especially, probably led to Zuiho not being used as well as it might.
Between the flood of Essex class CVs and the slightly smaller flood of the Cleveland-conversion Independence class CVLs, the IJN just got buried.
Zuiho had an amazing combat record, surviving about every major naval engagement of the war, until finally being sunk in the decoy force at Leyte Gulf, while the
Independence class CVLs really never fulfilled the niche for which they were built. They were a block of
Cleveland series CLs (Ships that were maximum-sized cruiser hulls already), modified on the ways quite extensively to be carriers holding about half the complement of the preceding fleet carrier classes, to fill a foreseen gap in availability between the pre-war carriers and the delivery of the very numerous and overpowering
Essex class, the first of which was actually launched well before war broke out, but which took a long time to finish and fit out, being really the supercarriers of their time. In the event, the
Essex class ships started coming on line and making their presence felt before the CVLs were actually ready and able to fulfill that role, and also because the outcomes of Coral Sea, Midway, and the Guadalcanal Campaign threw the carrier balance so irretrievably into Allied favor that they ended up being used as just a faster Taffy group, with the ubiquitous CVE clusters fulfilling much of what would have been the CVLs' logical successor mission one the new real fleet carriers were appearing in force.
Very small island structures characterized both the CVEs and CVLs, partly for stability reasons (One of the time-consuming mods on the CVL hulls had been rebuilding the hulls to include asymmetric fuel storage bulges to offset the relatively modest island weight, since they were after all cruiser hulls with considerably less stability in roll than the CVs). This was only part of the reason the IJN chose minimal island structures themselves, one of the major reasons being air flow turbulence over the deck, which is much more critical on a smaller flight deck than on a moving continent like
Saratoga, the postwar angled deck
Essex rebuilds, the
Midway class, or a modern supercarrier. The large islands did prove to have one unforeseen advantage in that they provided an excellent location to site radar to clear the deck clutter and get a longer scan shot, but while the Japanese had radar, it was not as developed or prevalent as the USN's and due to their huge combat power inferiority it really wouldn't have helped them all that much after Midway, since knowing that hundreds of American strike planes are inbound and being able to do anything about it with 20 or 30 A6M5s are two entirely different propositions.
