I am not so sure. You seem to forget that carrier fleets are as much a result of political posturing as necessity and are a direct outgrowth of US experiences in the WWII in the Pacific, which is to put it diplomatically a classic case of "fighting the last war". Also the US has never been truly tested on the seas against anyone but militarily 3rd-rate, impoverished countries. I seem to recall a saying the submariners are rather fond of, to the effect that in case of a serious modern naval conflict there would be only two classes of ships at seas: submarines and ... "targets"!
Very important to note. Hell, the last time the US Army has ever had to face a lack of air superiority was in Korea. And the US Navy hasn't actually fought a serious blue water threat in all that time either.
The usual pattern in military thinking is that a system of tactics is worked out that incorporates the technology and national strengths of a given power. The system was good enough to put the people in charge where they are (or put their fathers and grandfathers there) so it's seen as a good thing. And with that much tradition and honor built up in the way things are done, nothing could possibly change it but for massive defeat on the battlefield, sometimes not even then.
The longer the peace won by the system of arms, the less likely it is that the leaders will perceive their weakness. The British refused to accept the danger posed to battleships by the torpedo. In their experience, the bigger the ship the more guns and thus the victory. They couldn't accept the thought of a smaller, almost disposable opponent capable of obliterating the larger, more expensive component. There had not been a shock like this in Europe since the crossbow. A proper longbow like the English used required a lifetime of training. A knight was ruinously expensive to train and equip but heavy cavalry was considered the king of the battlefield. But a crossbow meant any rude peasant with a weekend's training had the potential of taking out a knight. This was a threat to the very social order! Thus crossbows were banned from the "christian battlefield" for the longest time. You could use them against heathens but not against fellow believers.
Cruise missiles have made carriers very expensive floating targets. The Navy refuses to accept it, just like they refused to accept the power of the airplane. If not for WWII, battleships would still be seen as the center of the fleet's striking power to this very day.
Something else to ponder: the Soviet Union never invested in the massive carriers, focusing rather heavily on fast, long-range submarines instead. Presumably they also had "people thinking about fleet deployment for a living", don't you think? Or do you suppose they were all idiots, far beneath the American Super-Men, The Masters of the Universe?
The ruskies were a continental power, not a maritime one. They did not need to control the sea lines of communication, only deny them to their enemies. Soviet naval doctrine was based around this. Their ships were ridiculously overgunned (well, overmissiled) and were considered to not have as good of sea-keeping characteristics as British and American ships. But their whole point was to act as ship-killers. So no long overseas deployments, no long patrols. The subs were meant to be the far-ranging vessels and they were loaded with all sorts of carrier-killing missiles. Their heavy bomber fleets were built with the same intention.
If you sunk every merchantman in the Soviet fleet, they'd get by. Contrast this with the US. We're a maritime nation and the sea lanes are the veins through which our economy flows. We need oil, we need raw resources. At this point, we don't make shit in this country and depend on imports for some embarrassingly essential shit. If we don't control the sea, we die.
Towards the end of the Soviet Union was looking to construct proper carriers. This signaled a change in doctrine towards naval power projection. The USSR fell before this could be carried to fruition.
In this day and age, with our current technology, it would appear that the defense has the advantage on the high seas. An adage from the era of Nelson is "a ship's a fool that fights a fort." The obvious wisdom here is that a fort cannot be sunk whereas a ship can. Bad enough when the range of effective fire is measured in yards, far worse today when range is measured in hundreds or thousands of miles. A destroyer is far more vulnerable than a missile platform on shore, a carrier more vulnerable than an airbase. Between airborne and spaceborne detection systems, surface ships cannot hide. In a proper high tech war, the seas would be swept clean of ships and the only vessels with a chance of survival would be subs. This would be akin to the stalemate through most of WWI where both sides struggled to find a method of attack superior to entrenched defenses protected by barbed wire, artillery and machine gun. A lot of men died proving you couldn't beat the new technology simply by doing it the old way with more vigor.
The primary reason why this issue has not come to a head is because we do not currently face a scenario where two major technological superpowers could go to war. Even the most likely scenarios involve regional conflicts between regional powers.