A lot depends on what drills or actual scenarios the ship might be dealing with. Emcon conditions, modified watches, who knows. That far out was probably not still in a restricted manuevering doctrine since while busy they were not in a channel. Most likely is that the bridge team screwed up. But we yet do not know if they had radar and disregarded it, how well their plot was maintained, etc. I am sure the inquiry will find out.
Semi not related, I need to find the quote, but I think it was Nimitz or Halsey who disagreed with the then prevalant practice of wrecking a skippers career because he wrecked his ship. In their view hazarding his vessel was exactly what a destroyer captain was supposed to do in the face of the enemy and they needed to retain and channel the rash energy of those that ran their ship aground and such. Now in today's zero defect Navy that will not be happening. And young department heads and XOs will learn further to hide their mistakes since no mistakes gets you promoted.
When Erictank and I got rear-ended by the Leyte Gulf, some of those ambiguous conditions such as are we using radar were happening. We were in an emisions control condition. Our aft lookouts were pulled because my jet shop sidekicks were running a TF-30 on the stand. The ship was doing engineering drills. The Leyte was pulling plane guard. Nobody bothered to tell them we were done flight ops. Cue a crash stop from the engineering drills and it was suddenly hello cruiser, meet aircraft carrier.