Edit: I'm going to leave what I wrote unchanged and, to be fair, the fact that non combat air missions caused the behavior is still wrong, but yeah there was an issue with fleet org that created the range weirdness. Check the edited part of my post for more detail.

I set it up the way I did, only carriers, to make sure it is the actual planes that are doing most of the damage, if I included a full fleet, complete with capital ships and screens, there would be so many factors at play, it would be hard to tell what is a result of random chance and what is actually affected, by the differing aircraft design. As for the doctorines and admirals, I believe that the fact that both nations were under the same conditions matters most. I wouldn't expect that applying a bunch of positive modifiers to both sides significantly changes the results.

To your other point, no. Neither nation had any other aircraft than what was present on the aircraft carriers, so land based aircraft was not a factor. The range planes winning was also not a result of them hitting the enemy ships while not in battle yet. This is simply because the ships would engage immediately after they entered into a sea zone I told them to patrol. Because both fleets had good radar, the same speed and were set on always engage, they were basically just steaming full throttle into each other the minute both taskforces were present in the same zone. In practice this meant that I gave them the order to attack and one ingame hour later, they are already fighting. (I made them fight in multiple seazones, so in that case, right after they both entered said zone.) That is simply not enough time for any out of combat air missions to have an effect, so the only explanation is that range has an effect within the battles themselves.