Reading these battle reports it's little wonder the Japanese lost, all you hear about is how good the IJN aircraft were with their extreme range and fantastic maneuverability but when you loose this percentage of your forces on one strike your on a road to nowhere.
Well it's a bit of a chicken / egg thing, as we are debating the relative merits of carrier aircraft, and it has already been pointed out in here recently that the US was a bit ahead of the curve on the effectiveness of their AAA. F4F was clearly superior to the Sea Hurricane in many respects, USN pilot training and in particular gunnery training were extremely good.
Aircraft losses in combat (as opposed to, because their carrier sunk) clearly went up sharply for the Japanese in Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz. This is probably related to more fighters and more AAA.
At Santa Cruz the USN had four of their new "
Atlanta Class" CLAA cruisers. These had 8 dual 5" gun mounts plus many lighter guns.
The other thing I would note about the IJN aircraft -
Their fighters took a heavy toll of USN aircraft in air combats, and
Their strike aircraft, particularly the D3A, were
extremely lethal in sinking ships.
I will total up the number of attacking planes vs. actual hits, but in Pedestal (and many other Mediterranean battles) you can see cases where 20 or 30 German or Italian strike aircraft, unmolested by any Combat Air Patrol and facing relatively light AAA, still failed to get any hits. I don't think that would have happened with an equivalent number of D3A, B5N or even G4Ms.
We can also see that the D3A was every bit as lethal against British ships as they were against US ships (D3A at Ceylon, G3M at Singapore etc.). Once those "Vals" were in the sky in particular it was a good idea to find your life vest. I think the Japanese also benefited by the fact that unlike the USN, their torpedoes worked and worked very well, making their relatively unimpressive B5N still pretty lethal ship killers, and the same for the G3M and G4M. These weren't as dangerous as a D3A but they were getting hits more often than a Ju 88 or a SM.79.
The Japanese aircraft did ultimately suffer from high rates of attrition of course as we well know. The crew deaths were partly due to features of the aircraft and partly because the IJN (unlike the Royal Navy or USN) had almost no policies for rescuing downed aircrew. They sometimes sent ships or submarines to collect survivors, but almost as an afterthought. This was due to their mindset. (by contrast US had fleets of PBYs and OS2Us and many other planes, plus submarines and PT boats out looking for their valuable aircrew right after every fight, and the British did the equivalent generally speaking).
The Japanese Navy aircraft and their tactics were suited to a kind of lightning warfare, rapid tactical victory which could come at a heavy cost. This is what won them their victory at Peal Harbor and their conquests of Singapore, Malaysia, Java, and the Philippines.
What the US and Australians did was more or less fight them to a draw from the second quarter of 1942, on the ground at Guadalcanal and New Guinea, in the Air at New Guinea and Darwin and Guadalcanal, and out at sea out at Midway and all around the Solomons. At great cost. This turned the battle from "lightning war" to attrition, which
eventually doomed the Japanese.
But I don't think it is wise to sell them short. Considering they were basically in the Middle Ages in the 1870s, they were certainly a force to contend with in 1942.