The Bismarck design is included in Anthony Preston's book "The World's Worst Warships" and she had a number of inherent design flaws including but not limited to:
Triple screw propulsion - an undesirable feature of her direct design ancestor, the 1914 Bayern Class battleships;
Twin main gun turrets - three triple turrets would have been about the same weight allowing fewer hull openings while providing an extra tube. the Bismarck's were the only capital ships designed post WW1 where the main battery was exclusively located in twin mounts;
Single purpose secondary guns - The 15cm twin batteries were exclusively surface weapons whereas all Bismarck's counterparts (except the equally flawed Yamato's) had dual purpose secondary guns and so could dispense with the weight-wasting tertiary 10.5cm twin mounts;
Poor AA gun control and arrangement - the 10.5 cm batteries had seperate forward/aft controls rather than port/starboard fire control. Although her only air targets were slow flying Swordfish and a Catalina and despite much shooting, she failed to shoot down a single plane. The tired canard that the targets were too slow for the director settings lives on in myth but since the directors were actually dual purpose this excuse seems entirely bogus;
Although Bismarck proved difficult to sink she was very easy to knock out and she had stopped firing within 20-minutes in her last battle. There is evidence that the design was too rigid and prone to internal shock damage and the given her own guns knocked out her forward radar with the opening salvo against Norfolk and Suffolk and the loss of a couple of boilers from one of the non-penetrating torpedo hits from the first air attack this is certainly possible.
Of course posting anything negative about Bismarck, darling battleship of the Internet Forums is likely to result in accusations of trolling and flaming but it's a chance to take. The objective evidence indicates that Bismarck was an inferior design sailing on a doctrinally flawed and poorly executed mission while being badly handled in action to boot. The myth of Bismarck makes her a super-ship in some sort of Wagnarian drama that came within a hair's breadth of winning the war at sea. Readers choice...
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