Actually I wonder if it was.
I realise that the FAA did get lumbered with fighters that carried passengers when other naval powers with air arms tended to realise that a fighter doesn’t need a passenger, but to be realistic it wasn’t really until December 1941 that the full power of a fast carrier based attack force was demonstrated (the Taranto attack aside). However from then on, as the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942 demonstrated, the potential of the fast carrier attack force was realised. Later battles would of course make those two encounters seem almost minuscule despite their strategic lessons.
Admittedly the FAA started the war in 1939 with a rather poor assortment of aircraft but three years later it was groping towards some degree of parity with the US and Japanese naval aviation forces. Also while the RN was heavily engaged it was not heavily engaged in the types of sea-borne landing campaigns that the US and the Japanese were undertaking in the Pacific in 1942 which required fighters and attack aircraft of comparable abilities to land based types. In those campaigns passenger carrying fighters were a liability.
From 1939 until the beginning of 1942 the RN and the FAA were most deeply committed to anti-submarine convoy escort and the development of the smaller escort carriers for that role rather dictated a different use of air power. The RN did have large fast carriers but their role was rather limited until later in the war to the Mediterranean where they were easily supported by land based aircraft. In the Pacific when they were involved later the BPF was regarded very much as a unnecessary force by the USN (especially Admiral King) and as US carrier production and naval aircraft production reached the stage where it had outstripped the combat needs of the USN the British contribution was a political rather than a strategic gesture. To put it bluntly, and this is not a criticism of the BPF, US naval power made any British contribution simply redundant. The reason the BPF existed was that the US had made it clear that it was not fighting to restore the British colonies in SE Asia so the British had to be there even though in real terms their contribution was not needed as far as the Americans were concerned. But by then the mix of aircraft the FAA had for its small (by comparison with the US) force was adequately met by a mix of British and US types by the beginning of 1944 and that was when the really big Pacific campaigns got under way, while by then the escort carriers in the North Atlantic working with long range land based aircraft had begun to neutralize the major naval threat which was the U boats.
So on balance I suspect it is unwise to say that the FAA was a poor sister by comparing the FAA of 1939 with the state of carrier aviation in 1942. In 1939 both the US and Japanese had a similar mix of obsolescent or untried types and their naval aviation forces were by 1942 much different things.
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