This should not be a surprise for us to find out now as the British ran into the same problems early in the "Lean into France" campaign. Flying at long range cruise speeds was finally judged to near suicidal even for Spitfires. It took a Spitfire V about 2 minutes to go from a cruise speed of just over 200mph to full speed.
German fighters, of any type, putzing along at bomber cruise speeds would be flying too slow to successfully engage attacking fighters with the amount of warning time they had.
Starting every fight in a much lower energy state than your opponents is not a good way to fight.
That is interesting, as a benchmark of straight line acceleration. But I believe in battle this is not what fighter pilots did - a Spitfire would do a wingover and dive down to pick up speed, then zoom back up to altitude. Most American pilots would do a Split S or a wingover. I don't know for sure but I believe German pilots would do the same if they were caught slow. The other part of an energy state or E of course is
altitude. So it makes sense for escorting fighters which do have to stay with the bombers to fly higher, quite a bit higher, so that they can dive down to catch interceptors coming up from below. So long as someone spots the enemy in time, even a shallow dive can help enormously in picking up speed.
Historically at least some of the escorts would fly above the formation - for the German Bf 109s units in North Africa, who were operating in much smaller numbers than the BoB, it usually meant at least one
Schwarm or two
Rotte (4 fighters) out of a flight of 12 which would always be flying top cover. Interceptors would often be coming up from below, especially if they were relatively slow climbing planes like a Hurricane or a P-40. So some of the escorts could dive down on them even if they were flying with the bombers. The main tactical problem with 'tight escort' I believe was in not giving them the freedom to take off after the enemy planes.
It was a balance of problems - clever interceptor pilots would use lures to draw away escorts so that the bombers could be more easily attacked. This is what the 49th FG did to Zeros attacking Darwin. Aircraft which could dive pretty well could get away with this tactic to some extent - they shot down a lot of G4M's despite the Japanese raids coming in at an altitude where the US fighters could barely fly. They would attack in flights of four and draw off the Japanese escorts while diving away, and then another flight would hit the bombers. The British had learned to attack from out of the Sun and when Spitfires arrived in N/A the better Spitfire units would attack enemy formations from two directions at once, one from close to the same altitude, another one obliquely from above, from out of the Sun. A lot of this tactical chess game depends on how vulnerable the bombers are. This is where bomber defensive guns, and or performance / maneuverability comes into play. If the bombers can hold their own for a few minutes, it gives the escort fighter pilots more realistic flexibility. If the bombers are highly vulnerable the escorts can't risk getting too far away, because an enemy fighter can slip in and decimate the bomber formation in seconds.
For this reason the Germans in North Africa and the Med stuck increasingly to using Stukas, Ju 88s and even Bf 109 'Jabos' for bombers, while keeping their more vulnerable He 111's, SM. 79s and so on restricted to night time or maritime patrol duties. Interestingly I don't remember seeing Bf 110s being assigned to a lot of Jabo units ...( ?) Maybe John Vasco can correct me on that. The Ju 87s seemed to be good at evading attacks, breaking up their formations and twisting and turning with their big wings and dive brakes. They also had a trick with their engines where they would emit smoke that made it look like they had been hit. The Ju 88s were fast, pretty well armed and also maneuverable and seemed to have a fairly good survival rate as well.