I don't completely agree...timing was a huge reason the Japanese carriers wound up on the bottom. It did turn out that dive-bombing was a much more effective tactic than low-level, but if the Japanese CAP had been up at altitude when the dive-bombers arrived over target, the battle wouldn't have been nearly the success it was. But I feel like you're hand-waving away the failure of the TBDs and TBFs as 'poor kit' when that's only part of the story. It was a combination of aircraft, training and tactics that were developed to do a specific mission - low level torpedo attacks on capital ships - that turned out to be shit when things got real. They were doing their mission, as they'd been trained to do it, with planes that were purpose-built for the role, and it turned out to be completely ineffective in a real war.
Which brings us back around (I think?) to the original topic - tactics being developed in a vacuum. We can train guys to perfection that we're going to fight our helos by leaning out the back with polo mallets, but without using combat experience, or failing that, realistic and brutally honest evaluation, to judge those tactics, we're just signing up to lose people and airplanes. All the aggression and training in the professionalism in the world isn't going to mean a damn thing.