Kenjister

At close range bots can be far deadlier, assuming their guns have the ability to pen your belt from the angle they're at, because they will always lead you perfectly. At long range bots are often not as dangerous because they always predict where you're going to be based on your current course. Holding constant turns, even a small one, will continually throw off their shooting and you can negate almost all their damage.

The type of blowouts that you've been posting where one team hardly loses ships tends to be the result of one team taking very early losses without anything in return. It's especially noticeable if the ship lost was a DD, since suddenly the flank loses most of it's vision and is outnumbered. In most of these situations the remaining ships fall back from the flank/cap, which gives the enemy team a free cap and a major positioning advantage. Other times they'll attempt to fight it out anyways, which generally ends with giving the enemy team the cap, ship and positioning advantage for only minor damage inflicted. Neither of these situations is good, though the second option is a sure loss while the first option gives the enemy team the chance to throw the game. The only thing I can really say here is that when your flank abandons a ship to fight alone, don't stay behind out of some sort of obligation. In a steamroll 2 ships dies just as easily as 1, plus you're giving up the advantage of kiting.

Oh one last thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet because everyone was so focused on the planes. Kaga herself is extremely stealthy at sub 10km detection with concealment mod, which is pretty hilarious considering how tall she is. In practical terms this lets you get away with some fairly aggressive positioning that other CVs wouldn't dream of till lategame.

Quick answer: Yes. GZ has unreliable damage with an a non remarkable max, whereas Kaga is both consistent with high potential.

Kaga's strength lies in her raw reserve power - she can strike into heavy AA more often and more successfully than any of the t8 tech tree peers. In the past her planes were flimsy, but with the change to continuous AA a while back they were buffed to be nearly on par with Shokaku. Nowadays Kaga brings squads with absolutely massive HP pools on top of having a larger number of max squads per game. I've definitely overused this table, but it illustrates it quite well: Kaga's drawbacks lie in her plane ordinance. Her DB's don't hit particularly hard, nor do they saturate areas well. Her rockets are literally on par with the T6 CV Ryujo, and notably weak for tier. Her only truly strong squad are her TBs. They 4-drop moderate damage torps in a BB width spread which does great with flushing DDs out of smoke or catching broadside targets. They do have notably long arming times however, and against maneuvering targets you're likely to get more damage with Shokaku's hard hitting 2-drop. Kaga does have one final advantage too. Her plane reserves are so good the usual +2 plane/+5% regen mod can be dropped for the concealment mod. This makes her TBs have ~6.1km detection, and by the time the enemy spots them they'll already be in their attack run. This also makes them very good for finding DDs, since they can easily zero in to a location.

One of the best things about Georgia is you don't need to take Manual Secondaries to have effective ranged fire. Georgia has a baked-in dispersion bonus which mean with only AFT and the range mod she'll be reliably hitting targets out at 11.3km. Unlike the German BBs, Georgia will never do a lot of raw damage with secondaries to anything but DDs so it's debatable whether it's worth going all in on secondaries. I think most people run a standard survivability build + AFT on her, as it gives most of the advantages of the secondaries (free fires!), while keeping you resistant to HE spam from enemy cruisers.

Base 7.6 should give you far more than 9 something. AFT gives you +20% range, the secondary range equipment gives you +20% to secondary range AND accuracy, and the flag gives +5%. Combine them all and you should end up around 11.3km range, which is standard for high tier secondary focused ships. From the numbers it sounds like you're either missing AFT, or don't have the secondary equip mounted. The flag bonus is generally negligible.

I have Lutjens and have stuck him on my Z52. For your questions: Yes, the spotting heal is repeatable but rarely pops before I've taken damage. There are two reasons for this. First, in a CV game the CV often gets most of the spotting ribbons so the skill tends to proc much further into the game, effectively giving you a 3k HP for free. Second, if there are no CVs you're spotting ribbons will generally come from cruisers trying to shoot you or contact with the enemy DD. Both of those situations usually lead to you taking some damage, so the heal isn't wasted. I don't think the skill will be anywhere near as effective on cruisers or BBs however.

Tier 9 is one of the most comfortable tiers MM-wise at the moment, and also one of the tiers that get featured in ranked sprints or snowflake events. I recommend keeping any t9 ship that you enjoyed playing through, and none of the tier 9 premiums are bad. Personally I play them quite frequently when I'm in "play for fun mode" and they're also good to have on hand if you have any clanmates who are grinding up a line. T9 is often the longest grind so it's nice to have to ship to div up with them in.

True plunging fire doesn't exist in WoWS unfortunately. Since ranges are capped to ~20km for most battleships, the shells will never fall at a high enough angle to penetrate deck armor even if the fall angle looks steep enough in binocular view. Even at max range, shells that hit deck armor are at a low enough angle that they autobounce unless they're large enough caliber to overmatch the target. If you want a better look at this, tap Z after you fire. You'll get a chaser cam that follows the shells and you'll see how shallow of an angle they're actually coming in at. "Plunging fire" in WoWS is actually shells that penetrate the belt armor above the citadel yet come down at a steep enough angle to punch through the citadel armor anyways.

While citadel overpens do exist, particularly against the lightly armored CLs that's more or less the only time you'll be seeing them. A while back I spent a few hours in a training room with Roma to find out how common citadel overpens were and it turns out that even a perfectly broadside DM eats citadel pens at 2.5km. While it's possible that the slower USN shells retain more velocity after the initial impact I think it's unlikely that you'll be getting citadel overpens at range. What's most likely happening is you're either hitting ships with sunken citadels or simply aiming too high and hitting ship plating instead. On the other hand, I did find that Roma would overpen the citadel of a broadside Myoko up to ~8km (and possibly more) so when you're fighting lower tier ships, or any ship with only ~120mm belt armor, you should either aim slightly below the water line or wait until they're angled slightly before firing.

A bit of generic advice that I haven't seen mentioned yet: When you die in battle, watch other ships - preferably a ship that you play or a similar one. As an observer you'll notice a lot more than you do when you're playing, and there's a good chance you'll pick up a few good tricks or "oh I definitely shouldn't do that" tips just by watching. More importantly you'll be able to see how battles play out and how map positioning affects the team. Knowing how to read the flow of battles is an invaluable skill you only get via experience, and you'll miss out on that if you quit to port the second you're dead. As you get better you can start trying to predict what the ship you're observing will do next, and whether it'll be successful or not. This is a great way of building you own ability to predict enemy players, with the benefit of seeing how well things play out and why. Sometimes people will misplay horribly (like turning broadside in front of a DD), or sometimes you'll get a firsthand look at how a high level player can abuse certain traits of their ship to win fights.

The real big brain move is to cut to half speed. You may be virtually stopped but people can't seem to wrap their heads around it.

I've found California actually works far better in t9 than the other t7 BBs. She does really poorly against higher tier BBs, but 410s and 406's also lose most of their advantages vs t8+. On the other hand, her sheer volume of fire + good sigma makes her much more punishing to any cruiser that does get caught broadside regardless of tier. She's not great by any means, and bland may be one of the best ways to describe her, but I really can't call her bad.

Ark Royal is ridiculously overpowered when limited to same tier MM. She brings comparable rockets to Ryujo, a 3 drop converging torp spread, and level bombers that literally saturate the entire aiming circle. While the circle is oval shaped the nature of the bombs means you can still get off effective strikes from near any angle on cruisers and DDs. 3-5k per PASS on DDs is not uncommon and there's pretty much nothing they can do about it. Ryujo has strong planes but they require good approach angles. Ark has both damage AND ease of use, her only drawback is plane speed. Also there's the issue of Ark being able to snipe Ryujo. At tier 6 CV sniping is very possible since the HP pools are low and AA too poor to kill planes before they get off a single drop. Usually it doesn't happen however because it simply takes too long and the effort is best spent killing surface ships. Ark Royal however, has the absurd ability to pen Ryujo's deck with her carpet bombs. Just ONE attack wing from Ark bombers can do a theoretical max damage of 55k to Ryujo. And while this never really happens you can reliably get 18k+ hits, which is enough to kill a Ryujo in three passes. Or two good passes and one squad of regular rockets to finish her off. Get anywhere near a lategame situation where CVs need to engage each other and the Ark will win hands down. On some of the smaller maps you might not even have to wait.