I like the way you single out Hobart in that list. He was a textbook example of someone who "knew better" but was never willing to stick his neck out and show it in front of his superiors. But I think the biggest element in the failure there was that the entire British officer corps was an "old school" type of organization. To get ahead in those days one had to excel at doing things the same old way, never do anything of consequence in an unconventional manner (although it was just fine to be "eccentric" in inconsequential ways) and never make a superior officer look bad in any way.

I suspect that this is why the two armies which took to new methodologies the quickest were the USA and Germany. The USA because they had no entrenched doctrines to overthrow and were basically learning from scratch; and the Germans because the gutting of their military after WWI not only enabled but forced them to look long and hard at new ways of doing things. It was Poland's and France's bad luck that those aforementioned minds in the UK were pioneering doctrines which they had no intention of using but which taught the Germans not only exactly what they needed to know to build a modern army on a tight budget, but also how to use it more effectively than anyone else was prepared to face.