Properly exploiting the range was harder as the range increased.
The longer it took to form up a strike and the longer it took to fly to the intercept point the harder it was make the intercept/attack. The enemy fleet moved.
Spotters/shadowers could make up for that, if the spotters/shadowers weren't shot down/driven off. In some cases they were operating off of sighting by subs. But updates usually rely on a 2nd or 3rd sub. A 1 hour difference in arrival at the target location (4 hours instead of 3) can mean the enemy fleet is somewhere within a 50 NM circle of where it was at 3 hour mark.
Range is useful, it may not be decisive in some situations.
Fair point, but I don't buy it. Longer range gives you an opportunity to outgun the enemy, it is a chance you may not always effectively exploit in the chaos of combat, but certainly in WW2 it paid off several times for the IJN as I assume you are aware. It was an ongoing problem for the US with their shorter ranged aircraft.
I would also note that the US had more and better scouts in some battles. They certainly put a strong initial emphasis on it with half of their carrier based SBD dive bombers (one out of the two squadrons carried on a fleet carrier) trained as scout units. They changed this as the war went on but still had a bit better luck with their SBD scouts quite often.
I don't think you could call the A6M inferior in naval combat (as in carriers vs carriers) in 1942 or even 1943. Where they started to have problems is where they were put into sustained attritional engagements with land based fighter units at Darwin, in New Guinea, and (especially) in the Solomons.
In a way the A6M was a victim of it's own success. In theory carrier fighters would almost exclusively fight other naval aircraft, with maybe the occasional engagement with ground based forces. As ThomasP noted, in a carrier aircraft engagement, high casualties are somewhat expected and are worth it if the enemy carrier is sunk. On the level of cost alone, any capital ship represents a much larger investment in resources than a couple of squadrons of aircraft and their crews. In terms of capability as well - a fleet with a carrier is somewhat protected, a fleet with no air component is at a crippling disadvantage against a fleet with a carrier, and can expect to be defeated unless they flee.
The A6M was so capable that in early engagements it was not only effective, but dominant over land based fighters. This gradually changed to something nearer to parity by the end of 1942, as less capable fighters were removed from service and the better remaining ones were used with improved tactics and performance.
That resulted in a gradual frittering away of the exceedingly well-trained naval pilots and aircrew (because strike aircraft like the D3A were being used in these engagement too).
The losses in the naval engagements for the IJN were heavily exacerbated by the lack of a serious, dedicated air-sea rescue program. When both sides lost 50 aircraft, the US recovered 30 pilots and crew, the Japanese might get back 5.
This could perhaps be at least partly attributed to a 'warrior culture' issue. It goes along with not always having parachutes in the planes - to some extent the Japanese looked at a pilot shot down in combat as having been dishonored. Armor and self sealing tanks were a factor too, but maybe not as decisive as people tend to assume (at least not until later in the war when the API ammunition became more widely available for the US). If you read the day by day combat accounts from New Guinea etc., Japanese planes were definitely not blowing up or crashing with dead crew every time they got hit. They were routinely landing with battle damage. If they got hit well enough of course they were history. Nor were US planes immune to being ripped apart by cannon shells or set on fire when they were hit by a good burst.