I've long been of the opinion that the theoretical range and accuracy advantages of naval rifled guns were largely negated by the relatively short ranges that battles were actually fought at; the now-obvious superiority of rifles over smoothbores was by no means so obvious at the time, whereas reliability was generally on the side of the smoothbore.
Something that has always struck me is that the significant advances in armament, armor, and propulsion were not matched by similar strides in what we would call the command-and-control areas. Lt. Worden, commanding arguably the most advanced warship of his time on March 9, 1862, had to depend on his paymaster to run messages back and forth from the pilothouse to the turret-- and what that replaced, a speaking-tube, was not a particularly advanced piece of equipment either. Gun ranging and sighting was entirely by the proverbial Mark One eyeball except in some very specific and limited circumstances. And the principal reason Farragut tended to climb up the rigging was so he could see what was going on. Electricity and associated technologies like radio (and eventually, radar) would change all of this within a couple of generations, but for the moment, power had outraced the ability to really control it.